Alina Nepomnyashchikh


2024

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How to tame your plotline: A framework for goal-driven interactive fairy tale generation
Marina Ermolaeva | Anastasia Shakhmatova | Alina Nepomnyashchikh | Alena Fenogenova
Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding

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.