# TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03457 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03457/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2023.

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

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Pun Generation with Surprise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06828/) (2019)
- [Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03491/) (2018)
- [DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01875/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot Sonnet Generation with Discourse-level Planning and Aesthetics Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01821/) (2022)
- [EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12463/) (2022)
- [NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10602/) (2022)
- [Acrostic Poem Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02239/) (2020)
- [Youling: an AI-Assisted Lyrics Creation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06724/) (2022)
- [Improving Chinese Story Generation via Awareness of Syntactic Dependencies and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10618/) (2022)
- [Terminology-aware Medical Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15551/) (2022)
- [CADGE: Context-Aware Dialogue Generation Enhanced with Graph-Structured Knowledge Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06294/) (2023)
- [PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06275/) (2022)
- [Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05817/) (2015)
- [Context-Situated Pun Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13522/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13182/) (2023)
- [Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A Survey of Current Evaluation Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09169/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16195/) (2023)
- [Are Large Language Models Actually Good at Text Style Transfer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05885/) (2024)
- [The Iron(ic) Melting Pot: Reviewing Human Evaluation in Humour, Irony and Sarcasm Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05552/) (2023)
- [Improving Biomedical Abstractive Summarisation with Knowledge Aggregation from Citation Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15684/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Text Style Transfer: Datasets & Models for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20805/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text Style Transfer Evaluation: Are There Any Reliable Metrics?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04718/) (2025)
- [Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13335/) (2025)
- [A Cross-Attention Augmented Model for Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11271/) (2023)
- [Who's Laughing Now? An Overview of Computational Humour Generation and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21175/) (2025)
- [With Ears to See and Eyes to Hear: Sound Symbolism Experiments with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14917/) (2024)
- [Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13901/) (2024)
- [ACL Anthology Helper: A Tool to Retrieve and Manage Literature from ACL Anthology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20467/) (2023)
- [BioMNER: A Dataset for Biomedical Method Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20038/) (2024)
- [P-CoT: A Pedagogically-motivated Participatory Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Phonological Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16656/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous work in phonetically-grounded language generation has mainly focused on domains such as lyrics and poetry. In this paper, we present work on the generation of tongue twisters - a form of language that is required to be phonetically conditioned to maximise sound overlap, whilst maintaining semantic consistency with an input topic, and still being grammatically correct. We present TwistList, a large annotated dataset of tongue twisters, consisting of 2.1K+ human-authored examples. We additionally present several benchmark systems (referred to as TwisterMisters) for the proposed task of tongue twister generation, including models that both do and do not require training on in-domain data. We present the results of automatic and human evaluation to demonstrate the performance of existing mainstream pre-trained models in this task with limited (or no) task specific training and data, and no explicit phonetic knowledge. We find that the task of tongue twister generation is challenging for models under these conditions, yet some models are still capable of generating acceptable examples of this language type.