PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically

Sedrick Scott Keh, Steven Y. Feng, Varun Gangal, Malihe Alikhani, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
Tongue twisters are meaningful sentences that are difficult to pronounce. The process of automatically generating tongue twisters is challenging since the generated utterance must satisfy two conditions at once: phonetic difficulty and semantic meaning. Furthermore, phonetic difficulty is itself hard to characterize and is expressed in natural tongue twisters through a heterogeneous mix of phenomena such as alliteration and homophony. In this paper, we propose PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically. We leverage phoneme representations to capture the notion of phonetic difficulty, and we train language models to generate original tongue twisters on two proposed task settings. To do this, we curate a dataset called TT-Corp, consisting of existing English tongue twisters. Through automatic and human evaluation, as well as qualitative analysis, we show that PANCETTA generates novel, phonetically difficult, fluent, and semantically meaningful tongue twisters.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
491–504
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.36
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.36
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sedrick Scott Keh, Steven Y. Feng, Varun Gangal, Malihe Alikhani, and Eduard Hovy. 2023. PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 491–504, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically (Keh et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.36.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.36.mp4