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Modeling Protagonist Emotions for Emotion-Aware Storytelling

arXiv 2010.06822 ↗First posted 14 Oct 2020cs.CL cs.AIcited by 42

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Abstract (arXiv)

Emotions and their evolution play a central role in creating a captivating story. In this paper, we present the first study on modeling the emotional trajectory of the protagonist in neural storytelling. We design methods that generate stories that adhere to given story titles and desired emotion arcs for the protagonist. Our models include Emotion Supervision (EmoSup) and two Emotion-Reinforced (EmoRL) models. The EmoRL models use special rewards designed to regularize the story generation process through reinforcement learning. Our automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that these models are significantly better at generating stories that follow the desired emotion arcs compared to baseline methods, without sacrificing story quality.

Key facts. Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 16; 2023: 5; 2024: 7; 2025: 2; 2026: 3.

42 papers.

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  1. 2023Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?cited by 250
  2. 2021The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generationcited by 97
  3. 2022Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generationcited by 75
  4. 2021"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understandingcited by 48
  5. 2021Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inferencecited by 32
  6. 2021Inferring the Reader: Guiding Automated Story Generation with Commonsense Reasoningcited by 29
  7. 2021Automatic Story Generation: Challenges and Attemptscited by 28
  8. 2021LOT: A Story-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Chinese Long Text Understanding and Generationcited by 24
  9. 2022Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 22
  10. 2024What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluationcited by 17
  11. 2022A Corpus for Understanding and Generating Moral Storiescited by 16
  12. 2022Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generationcited by 15
30 more
  1. 2021Unsupervised Enrichment of Persona-grounded Dialog with Background Storiescited by 14
  2. 2022Recent Advances in Neural Text Generation: A Task-Agnostic Surveycited by 14
  3. 2023Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generationcited by 12
  4. 2024A Character-Centric Creative Story Generation via Imaginationcited by 12
  5. 2022Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generationcited by 11
  6. 2022Improving Chinese Story Generation via Awareness of Syntactic Dependencies and Semanticscited by 10
  7. 2024[Lions: 1] and [Tigers: 2] and [Bears: 3], Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMscited by 8
  8. 2021Fabula Entropy Indexing: Objective Measures of Story Coherencecited by 7
  9. 2022CHAE: Fine-Grained Controllable Story Generation with Characters, Actions and Emotionscited by 6
  10. 2022Frustratingly Easy Sentiment Analysis of Text Streams: Generating High-Quality Emotion Arcs Using Emotion Lexiconscited by 6
  11. 2022Dense-ATOMIC: Towards Densely-connected ATOMIC with High Knowledge Coverage and Massive Multi-hop Pathscited by 6
  12. 2023Detecting and Grounding Important Characters in Visual Storiescited by 6
  13. 2023Creative Data Generation: A Review Focusing on Text and Poetrycited by 5
  14. 2022ViNTER: Image Narrative Generation with Emotion-Arc-Aware Transformercited by 4
  15. 2022COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activitiescited by 4
  16. 2023Defining a New NLP Playgroundcited by 4
  17. 2025Classifying Unreliable Narrators with Large Language Modelscited by 4
  18. 2024Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpointscited by 3
  19. 2024BookWorm: A Dataset for Character Description and Analysiscited by 3
  20. 2024Show, Don't Tell: Uncovering Implicit Character Portrayal using LLMscited by 3
  21. 2021Does Commonsense help in detecting Sarcasm?cited by 2
  22. 2022Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generationcited by 2
  23. 2022CLSEG: Contrastive Learning of Story Ending Generationcited by 1
  24. 2022Computational Storytelling and Emotions: A Surveycited by 1
  25. 2024Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characterscited by 1
  26. 2026A Structured Clustering Approach for Inducing Media Narrativescited by 1
  27. 2022A Benchmark for Understanding and Generating Dialogue between Characters in Storiescited by 0
  28. 2025Story2MIDI: Emotionally Aligned Music Generation from Textcited by 0
  29. 2026Towards a Linguistic Evaluation of Narratives: A Quantitative Stylistic Frameworkcited by 0
  30. 2026CASPER in the Machine: Insights into Character Variety in LLM-Generated Storiescited by 0