# Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Controlled Text Generation as Continuous Optimization with Multiple Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01850/) (2021)
- [Mix and Match: Learning-free Controllable Text Generation using Energy Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13299/) (2022)
- [A Plug-and-Play Method for Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09707/) (2021)
- [Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07220/) (2019)
- [Constrained Text Generation with Global Guidance -- Case Study on CommonGen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07170/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Subtle Biases Need Subtler Measures: Dual Metrics for Evaluating Representative and Affinity Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14555/) (2024)
- [What's the plan? Metrics for implicit planning in LLMs and their application to rhyme generation and question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20164/) (2026)
- [Constraints First: A New MDD-based Model to Generate Sentences Under Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12415/) (2023)
- [Phraselette: A Poet's Procedural Palette](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06335/) (2025)
- [Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13901/) (2024)
- [Approximately Aligned Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01103/) (2024)
- [Learning to Align: Addressing Character Frequency Distribution Shifts in Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09846/) (2025)
- [Antislop: A Comprehensive Framework for Identifying and Eliminating Repetitive Patterns in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15061/) (2025)
- [Gatsby Without the 'E': Crafting Lipograms with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20501/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite rapid advancement in the field of Constrained Natural Language Generation, little time has been spent on exploring the potential of language models which have had their vocabularies lexically, semantically, and/or phonetically constrained. We find that most language models generate compelling text even under significant constraints. We present a simple and universally applicable technique for modifying the output of a language model by compositionally applying filter functions to the language models vocabulary before a unit of text is generated. This approach is plug-and-play and requires no modification to the model. To showcase the value of this technique, we present an easy to use AI writing assistant called Constrained Text Generation Studio (CTGS). CTGS allows users to generate or choose from text with any combination of a wide variety of constraints, such as banning a particular letter, forcing the generated words to have a certain number of syllables, and/or forcing the words to be partial anagrams of another word. We introduce a novel dataset of prose that omits the letter e. We show that our method results in strictly superior performance compared to fine-tuning alone on this dataset. We also present a Huggingface space web-app presenting this technique called Gadsby. The code is available to the public here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Generation-Studio