LITERARYBIGFIVE: Author-Personalized Text Generation in a Unified Interpretable Space

Jinghui Zhang, Lang Gao, Ao Li, Mingzhe Li, Ruihong Zeng, Zirui Song, Kentaro Inui, Xiuying Chen


Abstract
Personalized text generation for authors and literary writing is essential for applications such as adaptive writing assistants, creative support tools, and computational literary analysis. However, existing approaches to author modeling and personalization often represent writing behavior as independent labels, requiring large-scale corpus collection or fine-tuning for each author or stylistic category. Such formulations are costly, difficult to interpret, and poorly suited for generalizing across authors. Inspired by the Big Five theory of personality, we propose LiteraryBigFive, a framework that reframes authorial writing characteristics as coordinates within a unified and interpretable space. In this space, we derive each interpretable axis (e.g., Classicism, Emotionality) from activation-space contrasts between author-written and neutral passages, yielding distinct stylistic dimensions that allow texts or authors to be positioned within a five-dimensional system. Beyond localizing different authors, we further introduce an interpretable steering mechanism, which adaptively guides text generation toward target coordinates to perform author-personalized writing. Experimental results show that LiteraryBigFive improves authorial expressiveness while preserving semantic fidelity. The derived author per-axis scores strongly correlate with real-world literary consensus, offering transparent and interpretable explanations of author-specific generation behavior: https://github.com/Znull-1220/LiteraryBigFive.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.334
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
7041–7064
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.334/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinghui Zhang, Lang Gao, Ao Li, Mingzhe Li, Ruihong Zeng, Zirui Song, Kentaro Inui, and Xiuying Chen. 2026. LITERARYBIGFIVE: Author-Personalized Text Generation in a Unified Interpretable Space. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 7041–7064, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LITERARYBIGFIVE: Author-Personalized Text Generation in a Unified Interpretable Space (Zhang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.334.pdf