Youling: an AI -assisted Lyrics Creation System (2020)

Abstract: Recently, a variety of neural models have been proposed for lyrics generation. However, most previous work completes the generation process in a single pass with little human intervention. We believe that lyrics creation is a creative process with human intelligence centered. AI should play a role as an assistant in the lyrics creation process, where human interactions are crucial for high-quality creation. This paper demonstrates Youling , an AI-assisted lyrics creation system, designed to collaborate with music creators. In the lyrics generation process, Youling supports traditional one pass full-text generation mode as well as an interactive generation mode, which allows users to select the satisfactory sentences from generated candidates conditioned on preceding context. The system also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired sentences or words of lyrics repeatedly. Besides, Youling allows users to use multifaceted attributes to control the content and format of generated lyrics. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/DFeNpHk0pm4 .

## introduction lyrics generation has been a prevalent task in natural language generation (nlg), due to the easy availability of training data and the value of the application. however, despite the popularity of lyrics generation, there still lacks a comprehensive lyrics creation assistant system for music creators. previous researches @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite and systems @xcite @xcite , are mostly model-oriented, utilizing * equal contribution † corresponding author neural networks including gan, rnn-based or transformer-based @xcite sequence to sequence (seq2seq) models for sentence-wise lyrics generation. they complete the lyrics generation process in a single pass with specific keywords or content controlling attributes as input, involving little human intervention. however, we believe the lyrics creation process should be human intelligence centered, and ai systems shall serve as assistants, providing inspiration and embellishing the wording of lyrics. therefore, we demonstrate youling, an aiassisted lyrics creation system, which is designed to collaborate with music creators, help them efficiently create and polish draft lyrics. to fulfill the goal, youling supports interactive lyrics generation, in addition to the traditional one pass full-text generation. interactive lyrics generation allows users to carefully choose desirable sentences from generated candidates conditioned on preceding context line by line. preceding context can be either pregenerated, written by users, or a mix. youling also has a revision module, which supports users to revise any unsatisfied sentences or words of draft lyrics repeatedly. to ensure the controllability of generated lyrics, youling supports multifaceted controlling attributes to guide the model to generate lyrics. these controlling attributes can be divided into two categories, content controlling attributes and format controlling attributes. content controlling attributes include the lyrics' text style, the emotion or sentiment expressed in the lyrics, the theme described in the lyrics, and the keywords expected to appear in the lyrics. format controlling attributes include the acrostic characters(letters), the rhymes of the lyrics, the number of sentences, and the number of words per sentence. sentence polishing generation module revision module word polishing 想和你一起漫步校园 (want to wander with you on campus) 你那青春的笑脸 (the smile of your youth) user input 多年前的那个夏天 (that summer many years ago ) 我还是幼稚的少年 (i was still a naive teenager) 再回忆起当初的画面 (remembering the first images again) 见到你的第一眼 (the first time i saw you) 到现在都还怀念 (i still miss) 你那青春的容颜 (the face of your youth) full-text generation 多年前的那个夏天(ian) (that summer many years ago ) 想和你一起漫步校园(uan) (want to wander with you on campus) 再回忆起当初的画面(ian) (remembering the first images again) 见到你的第一眼(an) (the first time i saw you) 到现在都还怀念(ian) (i still miss) 你那青春的笑脸(ian) (the smile of your youth) 多年前的那个夏天(ian) (that summer many years ago ) 想和你一起漫步校园(uan) (want to wander with you on campus) 再回忆起当初的画面(ian) (remembering the first images again) interactive generation 见到你的第一眼(an) (the first time i saw you) 到现在都还怀念(ian) (i still miss) 你那青春的笑脸(ian) (the smile of your youth) format controlling attributes content controlling attributes style: 流行(pop) emotion: 积极 (positive) theme: 校园 (campus) expected keywords: 青春 (youth) acrostic: 多想再见到你 (i want to meet you again) rhyme: 言前辙 (yanqian) line count: 6 word count: 8, 9, 9, 7, 7, 7 figure 1 : architecture of youling. the system supports multifaceted controlling attributes in user input to control the content and format of lyrics. the generation module provides two modes for draft lyrics creation: full-text generation and interactive generation. the former generates a full lyrics while the latter generates following sentences conditioned on the preceding context. besides, a revision module is introduced to polish undesirable sentences or words. youling basing on a gpt-2 @xcite based language model with 210m parameters, pretrained on around 30 gigabytes of chinese books corpus. we further finetune youling on a corpus of 300k lyrics collected online. the contributions of the youling system are summarized as follows: we believe that youling foot_0 can assist music creators in lyrics creation and inspire other developers to make practical solutions for real-world problems. the 2-minute demonstration video can be available at https://youtu.be/dfenphk0pm4 . ## architecture the framework of youling is shown in figure 1 . the system mainly contains three parts: user input, generation module and revision module. we will describe them in detail in the following subsections. ## demonstration in this section, we demonstrate how youling assists music creators to create lyrics conveniently. first, we show how to generate draft lyrics based on multifaceted controlling attributes. users are asked to specify the controlling attributes, as shown in figure 4 . after the controlling attributes have been prepared, we use the full-text generation mode to generate the draft lyrics, as shown in figure 5(a) . after the draft lyrics are generated, we use the interactive generation mode to generate the following lines. note that in real cases, users can directly write lyrics or modify pre-generated lyrics in the input box and generate the following lines with interactive generation mode. here we use the unchanged generated draft lyrics for convenience of demonstration. after completing the draft lyrics by carefully choosing the final line from generated candidates, we can further polish the undesired parts of the generated lyrics. here we replace a flawed sentence with the best suggestion made by the revision module under sentence level, as seen in figure 6(a) . however, we are still not completely satisfied with the last word in the previous suggested sentence. we switch to word level and replace the last word with an appropriate word suggested by the revision model, as shown in figure 6 (b). as described above, users can repeatedly revise the lyrics until desirable results are obtained. to facilitate the process, youling provides version control so that users can create lyrics with peace of mind. ## conclusion in this paper, we demonstrate youling, an aiassisted lyrics creation system. youling can accept multifaceted controlling attributes to control the content and format of generated lyrics. in the lyrics generation process, youling supports traditional one pass full-text generation mode as well as an interactive generation mode. besides, the system also provides a revision module which enables users to revise the undesirable sentences or words of lyrics repeatedly. we hope our system can assist music creators in lyrics creation and inspire other developers to make better solutions for nlg applications.