# "Kurosawa": A Script Writer's Assistant

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03122/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03968/) (2016)
- [Strategies for Structuring Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01109/) (2019)
- [PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14967/) (2020)
- [Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05572/) (2019)
- [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 Generation from Sequence of Independent Short Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05501/) (2017)
- [Chinese Poetry Generation with Planning based Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09889/) (2016)
- [ScriptWriter: Narrative-Guided Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10331/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Storytelling is the lifeline of the entertainment industry -- movies, TV shows, and stand-up comedies, all need stories. A good and gripping script is the lifeline of storytelling and demands creativity and resource investment. Good scriptwriters are rare to find and often work under severe time pressure. Consequently, entertainment media are actively looking for automation. In this paper, we present an AI-based script-writing workbench called KUROSAWA which addresses the tasks of plot generation and script generation. Plot generation aims to generate a coherent and creative plot (600-800 words) given a prompt (15-40 words). Script generation, on the other hand, generates a scene (200-500 words) in a screenplay format from a brief description (15-40 words). Kurosawa needs data to train. We use a 4-act structure of storytelling to annotate the plot dataset manually. We create a dataset of 1000 manually annotated plots and their corresponding prompts/storylines and a gold-standard dataset of 1000 scenes with four main elements -- scene headings, action lines, dialogues, and character names -- tagged individually. We fine-tune GPT-3 with the above datasets to generate plots and scenes. These plots and scenes are first evaluated and then used by the scriptwriters of a large and famous media platform ErosNow. We release the annotated datasets and the models trained on these datasets as a working benchmark for automatic movie plot and script generation.