# Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15079 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15079/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Data-to-Text Generation with Content Selection and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00582/) (2018)
- [Trading Off Diversity and Quality in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10450/) (2020)
- [RUBER: An Unsupervised Method for Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03079/) (2017)
- [Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11646/) (2022)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3841/) (2014)
- [UNION: An Unreferenced Metric for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07602/) (2020)
- [Modeling Protagonist Emotions for Emotion-Aware Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06822/) (2020)
- [Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06437/) (2021)
- [Inferring the Reader: Guiding Automated Story Generation with Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01311/) (2021)
- [Story Generation from Sequence of Independent Short Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05501/) (2017)
- [Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-Centric Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14187/) (2022)
- [Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10703/) (2022)
- [Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01898/) (2022)
- [Modelling Suspense in Short Stories as Uncertainty Reduction over Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14905/) (2020)
- [Inspiration through Observation: Demonstrating the Influence of Automatically Generated Text on Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04007/) (2021)
- [Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00676/) (2022)
- [Contextualized Scene Imagination for Generative Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06318/) (2021)
- [M-SENSE: Modeling Narrative Structure in Short Personal Narratives Using Protagonist's Mental Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09418/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [Agents' Room: Narrative Generation through Multi-step Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02603/) (2024)
- [Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02428/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models: A Dynamical Systems View of Successive Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15208/) (2025)
- [MoPS: Modular Story Premise Synthesis for Open-Ended Automatic Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05690/) (2024)
- [Monotonic Paraphrasing Improves Generalization of Language Model Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16038/) (2024)
- [SudoLM: Learning Access Control of Parametric Knowledge with Authorization Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14676/) (2024)
- [SkyScript-100M: 1,000,000,000 Pairs of Scripts and Shooting Scripts for Short Drama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09333/) (2024)
- [Familiarity-Aware Evidence Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12468/) (2024)
- [Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00829/) (2024)
- [Pastiche Novel Generation Creating: Fan Fiction You Love in Your Favorite Author's Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15616/) (2025)
- [DiscoSum: Discourse-aware News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06930/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Storytelling's captivating potential makes it a fascinating research area, with implications for entertainment, education, therapy, and cognitive studies. In this paper, we propose Affective Story Generator (AffGen) for generating interesting narratives. AffGen introduces "intriguing twists" in narratives by employing two novel techniques-Dynamic Beam Sizing and Affective Reranking. Dynamic Beam Sizing encourages less predictable, more captivating word choices using a contextual multi-arm bandit model. Affective Reranking prioritizes sentence candidates based on affect intensity. Our empirical evaluations, both automatic and human, demonstrate AffGen's superior performance over existing baselines in generating affectively charged and interesting narratives. Our ablation study and analysis provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of AffGen.