Automatic Multi-Path Web Story Creation from a Structural Article

TL;DR

This paper introduces Wiki2Story, an automated pipeline that transforms structural Wikipedia articles into interactive, mobile-friendly Web Stories by dynamically slicing content and generating visually appealing summaries.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for converting dense articles into engaging Web Stories using language and layout models, tailored for mobile browsing.

Findings

Effective content summarization and presentation in Web Stories.

High user engagement and interest in generated stories.

Successful application on 500 Wikipedia articles.

Abstract

Web articles such as Wikipedia serve as one of the major sources of knowledge dissemination and online learning. However, their in-depth information--often in a dense text format--may not be suitable for mobile browsing, even in a responsive UI. We propose an automatic approach that converts a structural article of any length into a set of interactive Web Stories that are ideal for mobile experiences. We focused on Wikipedia articles and developed Wiki2Story, a pipeline based on language and layout models, to demonstrate the concept. Wiki2Story dynamically slices an article and plans one to multiple Story paths according to the document hierarchy. For each slice, it generates a multi-page summary Story composed of text and image pairs in visually-appealing layouts. We derived design principles from an analysis of manually-created Story practices. We executed our pipeline on 500 Wikipedia documents and conducted user studies to review selected outputs. Results showed that Wiki2Story effectively captured and presented salient content from the original articles and sparked interest in viewers.