Modern French Poetry Generation with RoBERTa and GPT-2

We present a novel neural model for modern poetry generation in French. The model consists of two pretrained neural models that are fine-tuned for the poem generation task. The encoder of the model is a RoBERTa based one while the decoder is based on GPT-2. This way the model can benefit from the superior natural language understanding performance of RoBERTa and the good natural language generation performance of GPT-2. Our evaluation shows that the model can create French poetry successfully. On a 5 point scale, the lowest score of 3.57 was given by human judges to typicality and emotionality of the output poetry while the best score of 3.79 was given to understandability.