  Tongue twisters are meaningful sentences that are difficult to pronounce. The
process of automatically generating tongue twisters is challenging since the
generated utterance must satisfy two conditions at once: phonetic difficulty
and semantic meaning. Furthermore, phonetic difficulty is itself hard to
characterize and is expressed in natural tongue twisters through a
heterogeneous mix of phenomena such as alliteration and homophony. In this
paper, we propose PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue
Twisters Automatically. We leverage phoneme representations to capture the
notion of phonetic difficulty, and we train language models to generate
original tongue twisters on two proposed task settings. To do this, we curate a
dataset called PANCETTA, consisting of existing English tongue twisters.
Through automatic and human evaluation, as well as qualitative analysis, we
show that PANCETTA generates novel, phonetically difficult, fluent, and
semantically meaningful tongue twisters.
