Poetry generation in Sanskrit typically requires the verse to be semantically coherent and adhere to strict prosodic rules. In Sanskrit prosody, every line of a verse is typically a fixed length sequence of syllables adhering to prescribed binary patterns of syllable weights. We observe that instead of treating a verse as a monolithic sequence, segmenting them as grouped-lines leads to significant improvement in semantic coherence by 10\% with comparable metrical adherence. Specifically, PINGALA, our proposed decoding approach is designed to encourage every line to have well-formed words and our token selection biases the model towards it by preferring longer tokens. Writing in Sanskrit follows phonemic orthography, hence using a phonetically aware transliteration scheme, SLP1, increased the metrical alignment by 46\% with comparable semantic similarity, for a instruction fine-tuned large language models like Phi-4. We also introduce a new approach for reference-free evaluation using cross-encoders which achieved better alignment with true poetry instances.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.24413,
title = {PINGALA: Prosody-Aware Decoding for Sanskrit Poetry Generation},
author = {Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan and Atul Singh and Nallani Chakravartula Sahith and Amrith Krishna and Pawan Goyal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.24413},
year = {2026}
}