In plain words: A story generator is steered to follow a chosen emotional arc for the main character, using training signals and rewards that push the writing toward the desired feelings. It matched the target arcs better than standard story generators while keeping writing quality the same.
Abstract
Emotions and their evolution play a central role in creating a captivating story. In this paper, we present the first study on modeling the emotional trajectory of the protagonist in neural storytelling. We design methods that generate stories that adhere to given story titles and desired emotion arcs for the protagonist. Our models include Emotion Supervision (EmoSup) and two Emotion-Reinforced (EmoRL) models. The EmoRL models use special rewards designed to regularize the story generation process through reinforcement learning. Our automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that these models are significantly better at generating stories that follow the desired emotion arcs compared to baseline methods, without sacrificing story quality.
Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi
arXiv:2010.06822 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Oct 14, 2020 · updated Oct 20, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2020, update: Conference version of Weber et al. (2020) is cited