Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation
This addresses the problem of creating engaging, personality-driven stories for applications like creative writing or interactive narratives, representing an incremental improvement in persona control.
The paper tackled controlling a protagonist's personality in story generation by proposing CONPER, a planning-based model that explicitly links personas to events, resulting in outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in generating more coherent and persona-controllable stories.
Endowing the protagonist with a specific personality is essential for writing an engaging story. In this paper, we aim to control the protagonist's persona in story generation, i.e., generating a story from a leading context and a persona description, where the protagonist should exhibit the specified personality through a coherent event sequence. Considering that personas are usually embodied implicitly and sparsely in stories, we propose a planning-based generation model named CONPER to explicitly model the relationship between personas and events. CONPER first plans events of the protagonist's behavior which are motivated by the specified persona through predicting one target sentence, then plans the plot as a sequence of keywords with the guidance of the predicted persona-related events and commonsense knowledge, and finally generates the whole story. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate that CONPER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for generating more coherent and persona-controllable stories.