Abstract: We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables hierarchical story generation, where the model first generates a premise, and then transforms it into a passage of text. We gain further improvements with a novel form of model fusion that improves the relevance of the story to the prompt, and adding a new gated multi-scale self-attention mechanism to model long-range context. Experiments show large improvements over strong baselines on both automated and human evaluations. Human judges prefer stories generated by our approach to those from a strong non-hierarchical model by a factor of two to one.

Introduction: Story-telling is on the frontier of current text generation technology: stories must remain thematically consistent across the complete document, requiring modeling very long range dependencies; stories require creativity; and stories need a high level plot, necessitating planning ahead rather than word-by-word generation BIBREF0 . We tackle the challenges of story-telling with a hierarchical model, which first generates a sentence called the prompt describing the topic for the story, and then conditions on this prompt when generating the story. Conditioning on the prompt or premise makes it easier to generate consistent stories because they provide grounding for the overall plot. It also reduces the tendency of standard sequence models to drift off topic. We find that standard sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models BIBREF1 applied to hierarchical story generation are prone to degenerating into language models that pay little attention to the writing prompt (a problem that has been noted in other domains, such as dialogue response generation BIBREF2 ). This failure is due to the complex and underspecified dependencies between the prompt and the story, which are much harder to model than the closer dependencies required for language modeling (for example, consider the subtle relationship between the first sentence and prompt in Figure FIGREF1 ). To improve the relevance of the generated story to its prompt, we introduce a fusion mechanism BIBREF3 where our model is trained on top of an pre-trained seq2seq model. To improve over the pre-trained model, the second model must focus on the link between the prompt and the story. For the first time, we show that fusion mechanisms can help seq2seq models build dependencies between their input and output. Another major challenge in story generation is the inefficiency of modeling long documents with standard recurrent architectures—stories contain 734 words on average in our dataset. We improve efficiency using a convolutional architecture, allowing whole stories to be encoded in parallel. Existing convolutional architectures only encode a bounded amount of context BIBREF4 , so we introduce a novel gated self-attention mechanism that allows the model to condition on its previous outputs at different time-scales. To train our models, we gathered a large dataset of 303,358 human generated stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Evaluating free form text is challenging, so we also introduce new evaluation metrics which isolate different aspects of story generation. Experiments show that our fusion and self-attention mechanisms improve over existing techniques on both automated and human evaluation measures. Our new dataset and neural architectures allow for models which can creatively generate longer, more consistent and more fluent passages of text. Human judges prefer our hierarchical model's stories twice as often as those of a non-hierarchical baseline.

Question: What human evaluation metrics do they look at?
Answer: Accuracy at pairing stories with the prompts used to generate them; accuracy of prompt ranking