GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence

Zhihua Wen, Zhiliang Tian, Wei Wu, Yuxin Yang, Yanqi Shi, Zhen Huang, Dongsheng Li


Abstract
Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories’ complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an “asking-why” prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative’s complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.262
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3980–3998
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.262
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.262
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhihua Wen, Zhiliang Tian, Wei Wu, Yuxin Yang, Yanqi Shi, Zhen Huang, and Dongsheng Li. 2023. GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3980–3998, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence (Wen et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.262.pdf