NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation

Chen Tang, Zhihao Zhang, Tyler Loakman, Chenghua Lin, Frank Guerin


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-short.24
Volume:
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)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
186–193
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.24
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Tang, Zhihao Zhang, Tyler Loakman, Chenghua Lin, and Frank Guerin. 2022. NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation. In 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), pages 186–193, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation (Tang et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.aacl-short.24.pdf