# "My Way of Telling a Story": Persona based Grounded Story Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06401 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06401/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05337/) (2022)
- [Grounding 'Grounding' in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02192/) (2021)
- [Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialog Challenge for Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07109/) (2022)
- [NEWTS: A Corpus for News Topic-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15661/) (2022)
- [Commonsense Knowledge Aware Concept Selection For Diverse and Informative Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02963/) (2021)
- [PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02364/) (2023)
- [What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14622/) (2024)
- [Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10703/) (2022)
- [From Tarzan to Tolkien: Controlling the Language Proficiency Level of LLMs for Content Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03030/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Neural Text Generation: A Task-Agnostic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03047/) (2022)
- [Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00676/) (2022)
- [Every picture tells a story: Image-grounded controllable stylistic story generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01638/) (2022)
- [ViNTER: Image Narrative Generation with Emotion-Arc-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07305/) (2022)
- [Persona-aware Generative Model for Code-mixed Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02915/) (2023)
- [Computational Storytelling and Emotions: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10967/) (2022)
- [Context-aware Visual Storytelling with Visual Prefix Tuning and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06259/) (2024)
- [From Image Captioning to Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual storytelling is the task of generating stories based on a sequence of images. Inspired by the recent works in neural generation focusing on controlling the form of text, this paper explores the idea of generating these stories in different personas. However, one of the main challenges of performing this task is the lack of a dataset of visual stories in different personas. Having said that, there are independent datasets for both visual storytelling and annotated sentences for various persona. In this paper we describe an approach to overcome this by getting labelled persona data from a different task and leveraging those annotations to perform persona based story generation. We inspect various ways of incorporating personality in both the encoder and the decoder representations to steer the generation in the target direction. To this end, we propose five models which are incremental extensions to the baseline model to perform the task at hand. In our experiments we use five different personas to guide the generation process. We find that the models based on our hypotheses perform better at capturing words while generating stories in the target persona.