How to tame your plotline: A framework for goal-driven interactive fairy tale generation

Marina Ermolaeva, Anastasia Shakhmatova, Alina Nepomnyashchikh, Alena Fenogenova


Abstract
Automatic storytelling is a difficult NLP task that poses a challenge even for state-of-the-art large language models. This paper proposes a pipeline for interactive fairy tale generation in a mixed-initiative setting. Our approach introduces a story goal as a stopping condition, imposes minimal structure on the narrative in the form of a simple emotional arc, and controls the transition between the stages of the story via system prompt engineering. The resulting framework reconciles creating a structured and complete short-form narrative with retaining player agency and allowing users to influence the storyline through their input. We evaluate our approach with several proprietary and open-source language models and examine its transferability to different languages, specifically English and Russian.
Anthology ID:
2024.wnu-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yash Kumar Lal, Elizabeth Clark, Mohit Iyyer, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Anneliese Brei, Faeze Brahman, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu
Venue:
WNU
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wnu-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marina Ermolaeva, Anastasia Shakhmatova, Alina Nepomnyashchikh, and Alena Fenogenova. 2024. How to tame your plotline: A framework for goal-driven interactive fairy tale generation. In Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 8–31, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How to tame your plotline: A framework for goal-driven interactive fairy tale generation (Ermolaeva et al., WNU 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wnu-1.2.pdf