Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CONPER, a planning-based model that explicitly incorporates persona descriptions into story generation, resulting in more coherent and persona-aligned narratives.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel planning-based approach, CONPER, which explicitly models persona-event relationships to improve controllability and coherence in story generation.

Findings

CONPER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in automatic evaluations.

CONPER generates stories with better coherence and persona consistency.

Manual evaluations confirm improved controllability of protagonist's persona.

Abstract

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. CONPER 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.