Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist’s Persona in Story Generation
Zhexin Zhang, Jiaxin Wen, Jian Guan, Minlie Huang · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · 2022
Endowing the protagonist with a specific personality is essential for writing an engaging story.In this paper, we aim to control the protagonist's persona in story generation, i.e., generating a story from a leading context and a persona description, where the protagonist should exhibit the specified personality through a coherent event sequence.Considering that personas are usually embodied implicitly and sparsely in stories, we propose a planning-based generation model named CONPER to explicitly model the relationship between personas and events.CON-PER first plans events of the protagonist's behavior which are motivated by the specified persona through predicting one target sentence, then plans the plot as a sequence of keywords with the guidance of the predicted persona-related events and commonsense knowledge, and finally generates the whole story.Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate that CONPER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for generating more coherent and persona-controllable stories.Our code is available at https:// github.com/thu-coai/ConPer.