A character-centric neural model for automated story generation

Abstract

Automated story generation is a challenging task which aims to automatically generate convincing stories composed of successive plots correlated with consistent characters. Most recent generation models are built upon advanced neural networks, e.g., variational autoencoder, generative adversarial network, convolutional sequence to sequence model. Although these models have achieved prompting results on learning linguistic patterns, very few methods consider the attributes and prior knowledge of the story genre, especially from the perspectives of explainability and consistency. To fill this gap, we propose a character-centric neural storytelling model, where a story is created encircling the given character, i.e., each part of a story is conditioned on a given character and corresponded context environment. In this way, we explicitly capture the character information and the relations between plots and characters to improve explainability and consistency. Experimental results on open dataset indicate that our model yields meaningful improvements over several strong baselines on both human and automatic evaluations.