Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation

Tenghao Huang, Ehsan Qasemi, Bangzheng Li, He Wang, Faeze Brahman, Muhao Chen, Snigdha Chaturvedi


Abstract
Storytelling’s captivating potential makes it a fascinating research area, with implications for entertainment, education, therapy, and cognitive studies. In this paper, we propose Affective Story Generator (AffGen) for generating interesting narratives. AffGen introduces ‘intriguing twists’ in narratives by employing two novel techniques—Dynamic Beam Sizing and Affective Reranking. Dynamic Beam Sizing encourages less predictable, more captivating word choices using a contextual multi-arm bandit model. Affective Reranking prioritizes sentence candidates based on affect intensity. Our empirical evaluations, both automatic and human, demonstrate AffGen’s superior performance over existing baselines in generating affectively charged and interesting narratives. Our ablation study and analysis provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of AffGen.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.789
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:
11792–11806
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.789
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.789
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tenghao Huang, Ehsan Qasemi, Bangzheng Li, He Wang, Faeze Brahman, Muhao Chen, and Snigdha Chaturvedi. 2023. Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11792–11806, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation (Huang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.789.pdf