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Say What? Collaborative Pop Lyric Generation Using Multitask Transfer Learning

Computation and Language 2021-11-16 v1 Human-Computer Interaction Machine Learning

Abstract

Lyric generation is a popular sub-field of natural language generation that has seen growth in recent years. Pop lyrics are of unique interest due to the genre's unique style and content, in addition to the high level of collaboration that goes on behind the scenes in the professional pop songwriting process. In this paper, we present a collaborative line-level lyric generation system that utilizes transfer-learning via the T5 transformer model, which, till date, has not been used to generate pop lyrics. By working and communicating directly with professional songwriters, we develop a model that is able to learn lyrical and stylistic tasks like rhyming, matching line beat requirements, and ending lines with specific target words. Our approach compares favorably to existing methods for multiple datasets and yields positive results from our online studies and interviews with industry songwriters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.07592,
  title  = {Say What? Collaborative Pop Lyric Generation Using Multitask Transfer Learning},
  author = {Naveen Ram and Tanay Gummadi and Rahul Bhethanabotla and Richard J. Savery and Gil Weinberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.07592},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

HAI '21: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:38:24.534Z