Story Generation with Rich Details

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2346–2351 Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 8-13, 2020 2346 Story Generation with Rich Details Fangzhou Zhai†, Vera Demberg†,‡, and Alexander Koller† † Dept. of Language Science and Technology ‡ Dept. of Computer Science Saarland Informatics Campus Saarland University {fzhai, vera, koller}@coli.uni-saarland.de Abstract Automatically generated stories should be not only coherent, but also interesting. Thus apart from realizing a story line, the text also have to include rich details to engage the readers. We propose a model that features two different generation components: (1) an outliner, which proceeds the main story line to establish global coherence; and (2) a detailer, which supplies relevant details to the story in a locally coherent manner. Human evaluation show that our model substantially improves the informativeness of generated text while retaining its coherence, outperforming a number of baselines. 1 Introduction Story generation is the task of automatically crafting stories. Recent neural story generation systems have been able to produce coherent stories. Global coherence could be established by conditioning language models on the longer-term intention of the text. One could provide a topic (see, e.g. Fan et al. (2018), Fan et al. (2019)), a list of events (see, e.g. Zhai et al. (2019), Martin et al. (2018), Ammanabrolu et al. (2019)) or entities (see, e.g. Kiddon et al. (2016), Clark et al. (2018)) etc., to guide the generation process. But apart from being globally coherent, a story also needs to be interesting to engage its readers. yesterday i went grocery shopping . i made a list of my list and drove to the grocery store . when i entered the store , i grabbed a shopping cart and pushed the cart down to the meat aisle . i got all my items , and crossed items on my list . i went to the checkout register and paid for my groceries . i put my groceries in my cart and left . Figure 1: A story about grocery shopping generated by Zhai et al. (2019), which is globally coherent but really boring. Figure 2: Sample Data from INSCRIPT. The left column list the event annotations, and on the right are the text segments corresponding to each event annotation. The story naturally decomposes to be an alternating effort between outlining and detailing. Figure 1 shows a story about grocery shopping. The story is globally coherent as a narration of grocery shopping, but no one would be interested by such a story: it hardly provides any further information than what the topic grocery shopping already indicates. Our key observation is that, story writing could be seen as the joint efforts of two different components, and a story generation system would benefit from modelling them differently. (1) Outlining, where a This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Licence details: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 2347 story realizes a (usually) linear story line step by step, thus establishing the global coherence of the text. (2) Detailing, where the author …

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