{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sketch-and-customize-a-counterfactual-story","title":"Sketch and Customize: A Counterfactual Story Generator","arxiv_id":"2104.00929","date":"2021-04-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Changying Hao","Liang Pang","Yanyan Lan","Yan Wang","Jiafeng Guo","Xueqi Cheng"],"abstract":"Recent text generation models are easy to generate relevant and fluent text for the given text, while lack of causal reasoning ability when we change some parts of the given text. Counterfactual story rewriting is a recently proposed task to test the causal reasoning ability for text generation models, which requires a model to predict the corresponding story ending when the condition is modified to a counterfactual one. Previous works have shown that the traditional sequence-to-sequence model cannot well handle this problem, as it often captures some spurious correlations between the original and counterfactual endings, instead of the causal relations between conditions and endings. To address this issue, we propose a sketch-and-customize generation model guided by the causality implicated in the conditions and endings. In the sketch stage, a skeleton is extracted by removing words which are conflict to the counterfactual condition, from the original ending. In the customize stage, a generation model is used to fill proper words in the skeleton under the guidance of the counterfactual condition. In this way, the obtained counterfactual ending is both relevant to the original ending and consistent with the counterfactual condition. Experimental results show that the proposed model generates much better endings, as compared with the traditional sequence-to-sequence model.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00929v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00929v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sketch-and-customize-a-counterfactual-story","repo_url":"https://github.com/ying-A/SandC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2104.00929","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}