Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication

Ruize Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Ying Cheng, Piji Li, Haijun Shan, Ji Zhang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract
Visual storytelling aims to generate a narrative paragraph from a sequence of images automatically. Existing approaches construct text description independently for each image and roughly concatenate them as a story, which leads to the problem of generating semantically incoherent content. In this paper, we propose a new way for visual storytelling by introducing a topic description task to detect the global semantic context of an image stream. A story is then constructed with the guidance of the topic description. In order to combine the two generation tasks, we propose a multi-agent communication framework that regards the topic description generator and the story generator as two agents and learn them simultaneously via iterative updating mechanism. We validate our approach on VIST dataset, where quantitative results, ablations, and human evaluation demonstrate our method’s good ability in generating stories with higher quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.204
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2250–2260
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.204
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.204
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruize Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Ying Cheng, Piji Li, Haijun Shan, Ji Zhang, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing Huang. 2020. Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2250–2260, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication (Wang et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.204.pdf
Data
VIST
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