Story Generation with Rich Details (2020)

Abstract: Automatically generated stories need to be not only coherent, but also interesting. Apart from realizing a story line, the text also needs to include rich details to engage the readers. We propose a model that features two different generation components: an outliner, which proceeds the main story line to realize global coherence; a detailer, which supplies relevant details to the story in a locally coherent manner. Human evaluations show our model substantially improves the informativeness of generated text while retaining its coherence, outperforming various baselines.

## 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. 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 story realizes a (usually) linear story line step by step, thus establishing the global coherence of the text. we propose a model that generates stories with rich details, by addressing these two components differently: an outliner realizes consecutive events to establish the story line, whereas a detailer supplies additional details at specific points along the story line. human evaluations show that our system significantly outperforms various baselines in terms of informativeness, its outputs maintaining their coherence as stories about daily activities. ## conclusion we seek to generate detail-rich stories in a coherent manner. we address the story generation process by a combined effort of two components: the outliner that proceeds the story, and the detailer that supplies context-relevant details. the system generates detail-rich stories while maintaining their global coherence.