There Once Was a Really Bad Poet, It Was Automated but You Didn't Know It

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen consists of three important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word. The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).

Automated summary

Limerick generation presents significant challenges in poetry generation, requiring storytelling in just five lines while adhering to constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. LimGen, an automated system, outperforms other poetry models by utilizing Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint, Multi-Templated Beam Search, and probabilistic Storyline algorithms to produce limericks that meet poetic constraints with cohesive storylines.