Zhihao Zhang


2022

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NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation
Chen Tang | Zhihao Zhang | Tyler Loakman | Chenghua Lin | Frank Guerin
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

To improve the performance of long text generation, recent studies have leveraged automatically planned event structures (i.e. storylines) to guide story generation. Such prior works mostly employ end-to-end neural generation models to predict event sequences for a story. However, such generation models struggle to guarantee the narrative coherence of separate events due to the hallucination problem, and additionally the generated event sequences are often hard to control due to the end-to-end nature of the models. To address these challenges, we propose NGEP, an novel event planning framework which generates an event sequence by performing inference on an automatically constructed event graph and enhances generalisation ability through a neural event advisor. We conduct a range of experiments on multiple criteria, and the results demonstrate that our graph-based neural framework outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) event planning approaches, considering both the performance of event sequence generation and the effectiveness on the downstream task of story generation.