COMPASS: a Creative Support System that Alerts Novelists to the Unnoticed Missing Contents

When humans write, they may unintentionally omit some information. Complementing the omitted information using a computer is helpful in providing writing support. Recently, in the field of story understanding and generation, story completion (SC) was proposed to generate the missing parts of an incomplete story. Although its applicability is limited because it requires that the user have prior knowledge of the missing part of a story, missing position prediction (MPP) can be used to compensate for this problem. MPP aims to predict the position of the missing part, but the prerequisite knowledge that "one sentence is missing" is still required. In this study, we propose Variable Number MPP (VN-MPP), a new MPP task that removes this restriction; that is, the task to predict multiple missing sentences or to judge whether there are no missing sentences in the first place. We also propose two methods for this new MPP task. Furthermore, based on the novel task and methods, we developed a creative writing support system, COMPASS. The results of a user experiment involving professional creators who write texts in Japanese confirm the efficacy and utility of the developed system.