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Main Authors: Kumar, Nischal Ashok, Pham, Chau Minh, Iyyer, Mohit, Lan, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13028
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author Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Pham, Chau Minh
Iyyer, Mohit
Lan, Andrew
author_facet Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Pham, Chau Minh
Iyyer, Mohit
Lan, Andrew
contents Personalization is critical for improving user experience in interactive writing and educational applications, yet remains understudied in story generation. We study the task of personalizing story generation, where our goal is to mimic an author's writing style, given other stories written by them. We collect Mythos, a dataset of 3.6k stories from 112 authors, with an average of 16 stories per author, across five distinct sources reflecting diverse story-writing settings. We propose a two-stage pipeline for personalized story generation: first, we infer authors' implicit writing characteristics and organize them into an Author Writing Sheet, which is validated by humans to be of high quality; second, we simulate the author's persona using tailored persona descriptions and personalized story rules. We find that stories personalized using the Author Writing Sheet outperform a non-personalized baseline, achieving a 78% win-rate in capturing authors' past style and 59% in similarity to ground-truth author stories. Human evaluation supports these findings and further highlights trends, such as Reddit stories being easier to personalize, and the Creativity and Language Use aspects of stories being easier to personalize than the Plot.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Whose story is it? Personalizing story generation by inferring author styles
Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Pham, Chau Minh
Iyyer, Mohit
Lan, Andrew
Computation and Language
Personalization is critical for improving user experience in interactive writing and educational applications, yet remains understudied in story generation. We study the task of personalizing story generation, where our goal is to mimic an author's writing style, given other stories written by them. We collect Mythos, a dataset of 3.6k stories from 112 authors, with an average of 16 stories per author, across five distinct sources reflecting diverse story-writing settings. We propose a two-stage pipeline for personalized story generation: first, we infer authors' implicit writing characteristics and organize them into an Author Writing Sheet, which is validated by humans to be of high quality; second, we simulate the author's persona using tailored persona descriptions and personalized story rules. We find that stories personalized using the Author Writing Sheet outperform a non-personalized baseline, achieving a 78% win-rate in capturing authors' past style and 59% in similarity to ground-truth author stories. Human evaluation supports these findings and further highlights trends, such as Reddit stories being easier to personalize, and the Creativity and Language Use aspects of stories being easier to personalize than the Plot.
title Whose story is it? Personalizing story generation by inferring author styles
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13028