[2603.20851] Can ChatGPT Really Understand Modern Chinese Poetry?

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.20851 (cs) [Submitted on 21 Mar 2026] Title:Can ChatGPT Really Understand Modern Chinese Poetry? Authors:Shanshan Wang, Derek F. Wong, Jingming Yao, Lidia S. Chao View a PDF of the paper titled Can ChatGPT Really Understand Modern Chinese Poetry?, by Shanshan Wang and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:ChatGPT has demonstrated remarkable capabilities on both poetry generation and translation, yet its ability to truly understand poetry remains unexplored. Previous poetry-related work merely analyzed experimental outcomes without addressing fundamental issues of comprehension. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating ChatGPT's understanding of modern poetry. We collaborated with professional poets to evaluate ChatGPT's interpretation of modern Chinese poems by different poets along multiple dimensions. Evaluation results show that ChatGPT's interpretations align with the original poets' intents in over 73% of the cases. However, its understanding in certain dimensions, particularly in capturing poeticity, proved to be less satisfactory. These findings highlight the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed framework. This study not only evaluates ChatGPT's ability to understand modern poetry but also establishes a solid foundation for future research on LLMs and their application to poetry-related tasks. Comments: Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligen...