Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision

Kevin Yang, Yuandong Tian, Nanyun Peng, Dan Klein


Abstract
We consider the problem of automatically generating longer stories of over two thousand words. Compared to prior work on shorter stories, long-range plot coherence and relevance are more central challenges here. We propose the Recursive Reprompting and Revision framework (Re3) to address these challenges by (a) prompting a general-purpose language model to construct a structured overarching plan, and (b) generating story passages by repeatedly injecting contextual information from both the plan and current story state into a language model prompt. We then revise by (c) reranking different continuations for plot coherence and premise relevance, and finally (d) editing the best continuation for factual consistency. Compared to similar-length stories generated directly from the same base model, human evaluators judged substantially more of Re3’s stories as having a coherent overarching plot (by 14% absolute increase), and relevant to the given initial premise (by 20%).
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.296
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4393–4479
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.296
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.296
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kevin Yang, Yuandong Tian, Nanyun Peng, and Dan Klein. 2022. Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4393–4479, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision (Yang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.296.pdf