BERTian Poetics: Constrained Composition with Masked LMs

10/28/2021

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by   Christopher Akiki, et al.

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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.