A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence Among Sentences in Narrative Story Generation

Jingjing Xu, Xuancheng Ren, Yi Zhang, Qi Zeng, Xiaoyan Cai, Xu Sun


Abstract
Narrative story generation is a challenging problem because it demands the generated sentences with tight semantic connections, which has not been well studied by most existing generative models. To address this problem, we propose a skeleton-based model to promote the coherence of generated stories. Different from traditional models that generate a complete sentence at a stroke, the proposed model first generates the most critical phrases, called skeleton, and then expands the skeleton to a complete and fluent sentence. The skeleton is not manually defined, but learned by a reinforcement learning method. Compared to the state-of-the-art models, our skeleton-based model can generate significantly more coherent text according to human evaluation and automatic evaluation. The G-score is improved by 20.1% in human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
D18-1462
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4306–4315
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1462
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1462
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingjing Xu, Xuancheng Ren, Yi Zhang, Qi Zeng, Xiaoyan Cai, and Xu Sun. 2018. A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence Among Sentences in Narrative Story Generation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4306–4315, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence Among Sentences in Narrative Story Generation (Xu et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1462.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1462.mp4
Code
 lancopku/Skeleton-Based-Generation-Model
Data
Sentence Compression