@inproceedings{ashok-kumar-etal-2025-whose,
    title = "Whose story is it? Personalizing story generation by inferring author styles",
    author = "Ashok Kumar, Nischal  and
      Pham, Chau Minh  and
      Iyyer, Mohit  and
      Lan, Andrew",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.82/",
    pages = "1485--1540",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-298-5",
    abstract = "Personalization is critical for improving user experience in interactive writing and educational applications, yet remains understudied in story generation. We study the task of personalizing story generation, where our goal is to mimic an author{'}s writing style, given other stories written by them. We collect Mythos, a dataset of 3.6k stories from 112 authors, with an average of 16 stories per author, across five distinct sources reflecting diverse story-writing settings. We propose a two-stage pipeline for personalized story generation: first, we infer authors' implicit writing characteristics and organize them into an Author Writing Sheet, which is validated by humans to be of high quality; second, we simulate the author{'}s persona using tailored persona descriptions and personalized story rules. We find that stories personalized using the Author Writing Sheet outperform a non-personalized baseline, achieving a 78{\%} win-rate in capturing authors' past style and 59{\%} in similarity to ground-truth author stories. Human evaluation supports these findings and further highlights trends, such as Reddit stories being easier to personalize, and the Creativity and Language Use aspects of stories being easier to personalize than the Plot."
}