We suggest a new NLG task in the context of the discourse generation pipeline of computational storytelling systems. This task, textual embellishment, is defined by taking a text as input and generating a semantically equivalent output with increased lexical and syntactic complexity. Ideally, this would allow the authors of computational storytellers to implement just lightweight NLG systems and use a domain-independent embellishment module to translate its output into more literary text. We present promising first results on this task using LSTM Encoder-Decoder networks trained on the WikiLarge dataset. Furthermore, we introduce "Compiled Computer Tales", a corpus of computationally generated stories, that can be used to test the capabilities of embellishment algorithms.
Traditionally, narrative generation systems like were devised to generate macro-level plot and character elements without connecting them into a comprehensive story in natural language. Later work has sought to combine plot and NLG into a unified system @cite_14 . These full pipelines generate story elements and employ rule-based language models that produce naturally sounding narratives. While these approaches make use of text embellishment, the disadvantage of these rule-based approaches is that rules for text enrichment have to be conceived of in advance by the system's architect. The work presented here, in contrast, seeks to learn a natural language representation from human data to automatically embellish priorly generated narratives.
@cite_14
2156050092 2090487795 2798664956 2620635248
A spoken language generation system has been developed that learns to describe objects in computer-generated visual scenes. The system is trained by a ‘show-and-tell" procedure in which visual scenes are paired with natural language descriptions. Learning algorithms acquire probabilistic structures which encode the visual semantics of phrase structure, word classes, and individual words. Using these structures, a planning algorithm integrates syntactic, semantic, and contextual constraints to generate natural and unambiguous descriptions of objects in novel scenes. The system generates syntactically well-formed compound adjective noun phrases, as well as relative spatial clauses. The acquired linguistic structures generalize from training data, enabling the production of novel word sequences which were never observed during training. The output of the generation system is synthesized using word-based concatenative synthesis drawing from the original training speech corpus. In evaluations of semantic comprehension by human judges, the performance of automatically generated spoken descriptions was comparable to human-generated descriptions. This work is motivated by our long-term goal of developing spoken language processing systems which grounds semantics in machine perception and action. ! 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to produce a new story that matches a given user query. The plot structure is obtained by a case-based reasoning (CBR) process over a case base of tales and an ontology of explicitly declared relevant knowledge. The resulting story is generated as a sketch of a plot described in natural language by means of natural language generation (NLG) techniques. We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables hierarchical story generation, where the model first generates a premise, and then transforms it into a passage of text. We gain further improvements with a novel form of model fusion that improves the relevance of the story to the prompt, and adding a new gated multi-scale self-attention mechanism to model long-range context. Experiments show large improvements over strong baselines on both automated and human evaluations. Human judges prefer stories generated by our approach to those from a strong non-hierarchical model by a factor of two to one. Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in a spoken dialogue system. This paper presents a Recurrent Neural Network based Encoder-Decoder architecture, in which an LSTM-based decoder is introduced to select, aggregate semantic elements produced by an attention mechanism over the input elements, and to produce the required utterances. The proposed generator can be jointly trained both sentence planning and surface realization to produce natural language sentences. The proposed model was extensively evaluated on four different NLG datasets. The experimental results showed that the proposed generators not only consistently outperform the previous methods across all the NLG domains but also show an ability to generalize from a new, unseen domain and learn from multi-domain datasets.