Generating Narrative Text in a Switching Dynamical System

Noah Weber, Leena Shekhar, Heeyoung Kwon, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Nathanael Chambers


Abstract
Early work on narrative modeling used explicit plans and goals to generate stories, but the language generation itself was restricted and inflexible. Modern methods use language models for more robust generation, but often lack an explicit representation of the scaffolding and dynamics that guide a coherent narrative. This paper introduces a new model that integrates explicit narrative structure with neural language models, formalizing narrative modeling as a Switching Linear Dynamical System (SLDS). A SLDS is a dynamical system in which the latent dynamics of the system (i.e. how the state vector transforms over time) is controlled by top-level discrete switching variables. The switching variables represent narrative structure (e.g., sentiment or discourse states), while the latent state vector encodes information on the current state of the narrative. This probabilistic formulation allows us to control generation, and can be learned in a semi-supervised fashion using both labeled and unlabeled data. Additionally, we derive a Gibbs sampler for our model that can “fill in” arbitrary parts of the narrative, guided by the switching variables. Our filled-in (English language) narratives outperform several baselines on both automatic and human evaluations
Anthology ID:
2020.conll-1.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Raquel Fernández, Tal Linzen
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
520–530
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.conll-1.42
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.42
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Noah Weber, Leena Shekhar, Heeyoung Kwon, Niranjan Balasubramanian, and Nathanael Chambers. 2020. Generating Narrative Text in a Switching Dynamical System. In Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 520–530, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Narrative Text in a Switching Dynamical System (Weber et al., CoNLL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.conll-1.42.pdf
Code
 StonyBrookNLP/SLDS-Stories