Papers › Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets

Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets

5 Jun 2017arXiv:1706.01331archive 2025-07-28

Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Xinyu Wang, William Hancock, Shruti Singh, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl

Automated story generation is the problem of automatically selecting a sequence of events, actions, or words that can be told as a story. We seek to develop a system that can generate stories by learning everything it needs to know from textual story corpora. To date, recurrent neural networks that learn language models at character, word, or sentence levels have had little success generating coherent stories. We explore the question of event representations that provide a mid-level of abstraction between words and sentences in order to retain the semantic information of the original data while minimizing event sparsity. We present a technique for preprocessing textual story data into event sequences. We then present a technique for automated story generation whereby we decompose the problem into the generation of successive events (event2event) and the generation of natural language sentences from events (event2sentence). We give empirical results comparing different event representations and their effects on event successor generation and the translation of events to natural language.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

lara-martin/ASTER officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Event ExpansionSentenceStory GenerationTranslation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

MoviePlotEvents

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections