A Cognitive Writing Perspective for Constrained Long-Form Text Generation

Kaiyang Wan, Honglin Mu, Rui Hao, Haoran Luo, Tianle Gu, Xiuying Chen


Abstract
Like humans, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generate high-quality long-form text that adheres to strict requirements in a single pass. This challenge is unsurprising, as successful human writing, according to the Cognitive Writing Theory, is a complex cognitive process involving iterative planning, translating, reviewing, and monitoring. Motivated by these cognitive principles, we aim to equip LLMs with human-like cognitive writing capabilities through CogWriter, a novel training-free framework that transforms LLM constrained long-form text generation into a systematic cognitive writing paradigm. Our framework consists of two key modules: (1) a Planning Agent that performs hierarchical planning to decompose the task, and (2) multiple Generation Agents that execute these plans in parallel. The system maintains quality via continuous monitoring and reviewing mechanisms, which evaluate outputs against specified requirements and trigger necessary revisions. CogWriter demonstrates exceptional performance on LongGenBench, a benchmark for complex constrained long-form text generation. Even when using Qwen-2.5-14B as its backbone, CogWriter surpasses GPT-4o by 22% in complex instruction completion accuracy while reliably generating texts exceeding 10,000 words. We hope this cognitive science-inspired approach provides a paradigm for LLM writing advancements: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CogWriter-8DFE.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.511
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9832–9844
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.511/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaiyang Wan, Honglin Mu, Rui Hao, Haoran Luo, Tianle Gu, and Xiuying Chen. 2025. A Cognitive Writing Perspective for Constrained Long-Form Text Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 9832–9844, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Cognitive Writing Perspective for Constrained Long-Form Text Generation (Wan et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.511.pdf