# Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10703 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10703/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Structuring Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01109/) (2019)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14967/) (2020)
- [Content Planning for Neural Story Generation with Aristotelian Rescoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09870/) (2020)
- [A Pre-training Based Personalized Dialogue Generation Model with Persona-sparse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04700/) (2019)
- [MEGATRON-CNTRL: Controllable Story Generation with External Knowledge Using Large-Scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00840/) (2020)
- [Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11553/) (2019)
- [Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3841/) (2014)
- [Story Ending Generation with Incremental Encoding and Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10113/) (2018)
- [UNION: An Unreferenced Metric for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07602/) (2020)
- [Polite Dialogue Generation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03162/) (2018)
- [Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00583/) (2020)
- ["Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05438/) (2021)
- [Modeling Protagonist Emotions for Emotion-Aware Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06822/) (2020)
- [Automated Storytelling via Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00829/) (2020)
- [Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08383/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Entity Representations in Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00781/) (2017)
- ["My Way of Telling a Story": Persona based Grounded Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06401/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04634/) (2022)
- [PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02364/) (2023)
- [Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06058/) (2023)
- [Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15079/) (2023)
- [A Character-Centric Creative Story Generation via Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16667/) (2024)
- [Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00676/) (2022)
- [DeltaScore: Fine-Grained Story Evaluation with Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08991/) (2023)
- [Planning with Logical Graph-based Language Model for Instruction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13782/) (2023)
- [From Words to Worlds: Transforming One-line Prompt into Immersive Multi-modal Digital Stories with Communicative LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10478/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Instruction-Following Ability for Large Language Models on Story-Ending Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16356/) (2024)
- [Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18935/) (2024)
- [Tinker Tales: Interactive Storytelling Framework for Early Childhood Narrative Development and AI Literacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13969/) (2025)
- [A Benchmark for Understanding and Generating Dialogue between Characters in Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08524/) (2022)
- [Re3Dial: Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale Dialogue Corpus for Long-Turn Open-Domain Dialogue Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02606/) (2023)
- [ACL Anthology Helper: A Tool to Retrieve and Manage Literature from ACL Anthology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20467/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Endowing the protagonist with a specific personality is essential for writing an engaging story. In this paper, we aim to control the protagonist's persona in story generation, i.e., generating a story from a leading context and a persona description, where the protagonist should exhibit the specified personality through a coherent event sequence. Considering that personas are usually embodied implicitly and sparsely in stories, we propose a planning-based generation model named CONPER to explicitly model the relationship between personas and events. CONPER first plans events of the protagonist's behavior which are motivated by the specified persona through predicting one target sentence, then plans the plot as a sequence of keywords with the guidance of the predicted persona-related events and commonsense knowledge, and finally generates the whole story. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate that CONPER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for generating more coherent and persona-controllable stories.