BERTian Poetics: Constrained Composition with Masked LMs
Christopher Akiki, Martin Potthast · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021
Masked language models have recently been interpreted as energy-based sequence models that can be generated from using a Metropolis--Hastings sampler. This short paper demonstrates how this can be instrumentalized for constrained composition and explores the poetics implied by such a usage. Our focus on constraints makes it especially apt to understand the generated text through the poetics of the OuLiPo movement.