# SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15037 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15037/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [MASS: Masked Sequence to Sequence Pre-training for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02450/) (2019)
- [Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05339/) (2020)
- [SongMASS: Automatic Song Writing with Pre-training and Alignment Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05168/) (2020)
- [Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03491/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Youling: an AI-Assisted Lyrics Creation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06724/) (2022)
- [Learning Rhyming Constraints using Structured Adversaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06743/) (2019)
- [A Hierarchical Attention Based Seq2seq Model for Chinese Lyrics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06481/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14117/) (2024)
- [REFFLY: Melody-Constrained Lyrics Editing Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00292/) (2024)
- [Phun-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Phonological Understanding in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07300/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although lyrics generation has achieved significant progress in recent years, it has limited practical applications because the generated lyrics cannot be performed without composing compatible melodies. In this work, we bridge this practical gap by proposing a song rewriting system which rewrites the lyrics of an existing song such that the generated lyrics are compatible with the rhythm of the existing melody and thus singable. In particular, we propose SongRewriter,a controllable Chinese lyrics generation and editing system which assists users without prior knowledge of melody composition. The system is trained by a randomized multi-level masking strategy which produces a unified model for generating entirely new lyrics or editing a few fragments. To improve the controllabiliy of the generation process, we further incorporate a keyword prompt to control the lexical choices of the content and propose novel decoding constraints and a vowel modeling task to enable flexible end and internal rhyme schemes. While prior rhyming metrics are mainly for rap lyrics, we propose three novel rhyming evaluation metrics for song lyrics. Both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model performs better than the state-of-the-art models in both contents and rhyming quality.