Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist’s Persona in Story Generation

Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3346 - 3361 July 10-15, 2022 ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist’s Persona in Story Generation Zhexin Zhang∗, Jiaxin Wen∗, Jian Guan, Minlie Huang† The CoAI group, DCST; Institute for Artificial Intelligence; State Key Lab of Intelligent Technology and Systems; Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. {zx-zhang18, wenjx17, j-guan19}@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn aihuang@tsinghua.edu.cn Abstract Endowing the protagonist with a specific per- sonality is essential for writing an engag- ing story. In this paper, we aim to con- trol the protagonist’s persona in story gener- ation, i.e., generating a story from a leading context and a persona description, where the protagonist should exhibit the specified per- sonality through a coherent event sequence. Considering that personas are usually em- bodied implicitly and sparsely in stories, we propose a planning-based generation model named CONPER to explicitly model the rela- tionship between personas and events. CON- PER first plans events of the protagonist’s behavior which are motivated by the spec- ified persona through predicting one target sentence, then plans the plot as a sequence of keywords with the guidance of the pre- dicted persona-related events and common- sense knowledge, and finally generates the whole story. Both automatic and manual eval- uation results demonstrate that CONPER out- performs state-of-the-art baselines for gener- ating more coherent and persona-controllable stories. Our code is available at https:// github.com/thu-coai/ConPer. 1 Introduction Stories are important for entertainment. They are made engaging often by portraying animated and believable characters since a story plot unfolds as the characters interact with the object world cre- ated in the story (Young, 2000). Cognitive psychol- ogists determined that the ability of an audience to comprehend a story is strongly correlated with the characters’ believability (Graesser et al., 1991). And the believability mostly depends on whether the characters’ reaction to what has happened and their deliberate behavior accord with their per- sonas (e.g., weakness, abilities, occupations) (Mad- sen and Nielsen, 2009; Riedl and Young, 2010). *Equal contribution. †Corresponding author. Context: · · · Artur Boruc, a Polish national pilot, was going to get the group infiltrated into the area and prepared for the attack. · · · Metal began to tear through the thin wings outside the small win- dows and pinged heavily off the underside of the plane, a quiet ar- rival in Poland wasn’t going to be an option anymore. Persona A: [Boruc] A skilled pilot, trained in operating flight controls on the most common planes. Generated Story by CONPER Conditioned on Persona A: · · · He had been doing this much before, almost a week ago. He took a long pull of the airlock, checked his controls, and made a quick mental note of the exact sequence of instructions. He knew that he couldn’t be sure if this would be safe for much longer· · · Persona B: [Boruc] An unskilled pilot, …

Content truncated to 500 words