TOWARD AUTOMATED GENERATION OF CHINESE CLASSIC POETRY

Abstract

The forms of Chinese classic poetry have been developed through thousands of years of history and are still current in today's poetry society. A re-classification of the rhyming words, however, is necessary to keep the classic poetry up to date in the new settings of modern Chinese language. To ease the transition process, computing technology is used to help the readers as well as poetry writers to check the compliance of poems in accordance with the forms and to compose poems without the effort to learn the old grouping of rhyming words. A piece of software has been developed in a faculty/student research project at the University of Houston-Downtown to verify this idea. This software, called Chinese classic poetry wizard, provides the functionality of checking metrical forms and rhyming schemes. It also allows users to edit rhyme dictionaries and metrical forms. The new rhyming scheme proposed in this paper should rationalize the composition rules of classic Chinese poetry in the modern society; and the poem composition wizard will provide a handy tool for poem composition. This work will help revive Chinese classic poetry in modern society and, in a sequel, contribute to the current campaign of advocating Chinese traditional teachings.