Copiously Quote Classics: Improving Chinese Poetry Generation with historical allusion knowledge

Integrating allusions into poems is an advanced form of human poetry writing, which could clearly express the author’s thoughts and arouse the resonance of readers. However, existing poetry generation works mainly focus on improving the coherence and fluency of poetry, while generating poems with allusion knowledge is rarely considered. To solve this issue, we propose an Allusion-aware Chinese Poetry Generation (ACPG) framework in this study. Concretely, we first release an Allusion-Enriched Poetry (AEP) dataset by linking poems with historical allusions, which might enable a new research direction for poetry generation. Based on this dataset, we design a three-stage learning mechanism to encourage the training stage under a low-resource setting, which can effectively exploit the knowledge of large-scale poetry and allusion data to generate informative allusive poems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ACPG among a series of proposed baselines. Moreover, the proposed ACPG framework can also be applied to lyrics generation or other controlled text generation tasks, which can incorporate allusion knowledge into the generated results and enhance the meaning and quality of the texts.