Master’s Thesis Presentation • Machine Learning • Future Sight: Dynamic Story Generation with Large Pretrained Language Models

Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will take place online.

Brian Zimmerman, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Olga Vechtomova

Automated story generation has been an open problem in computing for many decades. Only with the recent wave of deep learning research have neural networks been applied to automated story generation tasks. Current deep learning agents for automated story generation typically ingest a prompt or storyline on which to condition generated text. This approach lacks the dynamism to include elements of a story only decided by the model during inference.

We build an interactive system using pretrained transformers finetuned on a novel objective to temporally interpolate between a story context c and a future plot event f. At inference time, users can suggest future plot events along with a distance, in sentences, to coerce a transformer decoder towards generating sentences that would both remain consistent with a story context and logically conclude with the future event.

The results of our experiments demonstrate that there is a notion of adherence to both context and future in some, but not all, cases. We discuss in detail potential explanations as to why the model fails to condition on some contexts and futures with respect to the data and the parameters of our model. We include examples sampled from our model to motivate this discussion.

To join this master’s thesis presentation on Zoom, please go to https://zoom.us/j/92780066822.