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

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.

Publication
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
Xuancheng Ren
Xuancheng Ren

My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.