{"id":32943,"date":"2017-05-29T11:18:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-29T16:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=32943"},"modified":"2017-05-29T11:32:13","modified_gmt":"2017-05-29T16:32:13","slug":"lil-ice-ai-writes-chinese-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=32943","title":{"rendered":"Li\u2019l Ice AI writes Chinese poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a week ago I received this Facebook query<\/a> from Scaruffi.com about Chinese chatbot poetry (relayed by Mark Liberman):<\/p>\n

Since friday Chinese social media are flooded with comments about a poetry book written by Microsoft's chatbot Xiaoice that was published on May 19 (three days ago).<\/p>\n

I cannot find a single reference to this book in Google's search engine.<\/p>\n

No western media seems to have picked up the news.
\n(As of today, monday the 22nd)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Intrigued, I decided to look into reports that a Microsoft chatbot was capable of writing a book of Chinese poetry.\u00a0 My curiosity was especially piqued because, around the same time, Google's AlphaGo AI had defeated the world champion Go player:<\/p>\n

\"China censored Google's AlphaGo match against world's best Go player<\/a>:\u00a0 Government barred broadcasters and online publishers from livestreaming game that saw China\u2019s Ke Jie narrowly beaten\" (The Guardian, 5\/24\/17)<\/p>\n

\"Minitrue: No Live Coverage of Ke Jie vs AlphaGo Games<\/a>\" (China Digital Times, 5\/22\/17)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Minitrue<\/a> = Ministry of Truth<\/p>\n

Hearing these reports, I thought to myself, \"What is happening?\u00a0 Is the day of reckoning upon us?\"<\/p>\n

Microsoft's AI programs were already writing sophisticated poetic couplets (du\u00ecli\u00e1n \u5bf9\u8054) several years ago.\u00a0 Here's the program<\/a>, referred to as the \"automatic couplet composer\".\u00a0 The directions are all in Chinese, but I can assure those who are interested in giving it a try that the \"automatic couplet composer\" offers a lot of flexibility and produces respectable, though not necessarily beautiful, couplets.<\/p>\n

This site<\/a> offers four of the quatrains written by Microsoft's famous chatbot, Xiaoice (Li\u2019l Ice), whom we met already a little over a year ago:<\/p>\n

\"AI for youth: success and failure<\/a>\" (3\/25\/16 [my birthday!])<\/p>\n

Here's the first of the four poems:<\/p>\n

l\u00e8ih\u00e9n y\u011b m\u00f3h\u00fa d\u00e9 b\u00f9 f\u0113nm\u00edng le
\nw\u01d2 de sh\u0113ngm\u00ecng sh\u00ec y\u00ecsh\u00f9
\ny\u01d2u hu\u00e1ngh\u016bn sh\u00ed x\u012bti\u0101n de f\u00fay\u00fan
\ny\u00f2ng c\u00e1ns\u01d4n de sh\u01d2uzh\u01ceng q\u00edqi\u00fa<\/p>\n

\u6cea\u75d5\u4e5f\u6a21\u7cca\u5f97\u4e0d\u5206\u660e\u4e86
\n\u6211\u7684\u751f\u547d<\/span>\u662f\u827a\u672f
\n\u6709\u9ec4\u660f\u65f6\u897f\u5929\u7684\u6d6e\u4e91
\n\u7528\u6b8b\u635f\u7684\u624b\u638c\u7948\u6c42<\/p>\n

Through the blur of tears, nothing is clear —
\nMy life is art;
\nDrifting clouds at dusk in the western sky,
\nWith my broken palms I pray.<\/p>\n

Not bad, eh?<\/p>\n

How did she do it?<\/p>\n

First of all, Xiaoice \"learned\" the poems of 519 modern poets from the 20s onward and then \"practiced\" them (i.e., was trained) ten thousand times.\u00a0 Her first attempts to write poetry were crude and halting, but by now she has matured and developed her own distinctive style.<\/p>\n

How does Xiaoice know what to write about?\u00a0 Though this is rather mind-boggling to me, just like a human poet, she gets her inspiration from a scene.\u00a0 She is shown a photograph and then takes it from there.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[Thanks to Geoff Wade, Brendan O'Kane, and Fangyi Cheng]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a week ago I received this Facebook query from Scaruffi.com about Chinese chatbot poetry (relayed by Mark Liberman): Since friday Chinese social media are flooded with comments about a poetry book written by Microsoft's chatbot Xiaoice that was published on May 19 (three days ago). I cannot find a single reference to this book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[223,222,202,259,205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-biology","category-language-and-food","category-multilingualism","category-signs","category-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32943"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32953,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32943\/revisions\/32953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}