# Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [A Deep Reinforced Model for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04304/) (2017)
- [Lexically Constrained Decoding for Sequence Generation Using Grid Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07138/) (2017)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Fast Lexically Constrained Decoding with Dynamic Beam Allocation for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06609/) (2018)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05567/) (2018)
- [SongMASS: Automatic Song Writing with Pre-training and Alignment Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05168/) (2020)
- [Controlling the Output Length of Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10408/) (2019)
- [Controllable Generation from Pre-trained Language Models via Inverse Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10685/) (2021)
- [SongNet: Rigid Formats Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08022/) (2020)
- [DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01875/) (2021)
- [DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04771/) (2015)
- [Melody-Conditioned Lyrics Generation with SeqGANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14709/) (2020)
- [Task-Oriented Dialogue System as Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13679/) (2021)
- [Neural Melody Composition from Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04318/) (2018)
- [Chinese Song Iambics Generation with Neural Attention-based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06274/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16816/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Melody-to-Lyric Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19228/) (2023)
- [Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15705/) (2023)
- [A Computational Evaluation Framework for Singable Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13715/) (2023)
- [K-pop Lyric Translation: Dataset, Analysis, and Neural-Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11093/) (2023)
- [REFFLY: Melody-Constrained Lyrics Editing Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00292/) (2024)
- [Sing it, Narrate it: Quality Musical Lyrics Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22066/) (2024)
- [Joint Learning of Wording and Formatting for Singable Melody-to-Lyric Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02146/) (2023)
- [Song Form-aware Full-Song Text-to-Lyrics Generation with Multi-Level Granularity Syllable Count Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13100/) (2024)
- [LyriCAR: A Difficulty-Aware Curriculum Reinforcement Learning Framework For Controllable Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19967/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Melody-Guided Lyrics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07760/) (2023)
- [MAVL: A Multilingual Audio-Video Lyrics Dataset for Animated Song Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18614/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words' tones with melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.