Abstract
Language-modeling–based approaches to story
plot generation attempt to construct a plot by sampling from a language model (LM) to predict the
next character, word, or sentence to add to the story.
LM techniques lack the ability to receive guidance
from the user to achieve a specific goal, resulting in
stories that don’t have a clear sense of progression
and lack coherence. We present a reward-shaping
technique that analyzes a story corpus and produces
intermediate rewards that are backpropagated into
a pre-trained LM in order to guide the model towards a given goal. Automated evaluations show
our technique can create a model that generates
story plots which consistently achieve a specified
goal. Human-subject studies show that the generated stories have more plausible event ordering than
baseline plot generation techniques