Related papers: Imagined versus Remembered Stories: Quantifying Di…
We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables…
Large language models sometimes produce structured, first-person descriptions that explicitly reference awareness or subjective experience. To better understand this behavior, we investigate one theoretically motivated condition under which…
Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable…
When we experience an event, it feels like our previous experiences, our interpretations of that event (e.g., aesthetics, emotions), and our current state will determine how we will remember it. However, recent work has revealed a strong…
Continual learning (CL) is a setting in which an agent has to learn from an incoming stream of data sequentially. CL performance evaluates the model's ability to continually learn and solve new problems with incremental available…
The concepts of information transfer and causal effect have received much recent attention, yet often the two are not appropriately distinguished and certain measures have been suggested to be suitable for both. We discuss two existing…
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…
Stories or narratives are comprised of a sequence of events. To compose interesting stories, professional writers often leverage a creative writing technique called flashback that inserts past events into current storylines as we commonly…
Story generation is a task that aims to automatically produce multiple sentences to make up a meaningful story. This task is challenging because it requires high-level understanding of semantic meaning of sentences and causality of story…
Machine learning models are known to memorize samples from their training data, raising concerns around privacy and generalization. Counterfactual self-influence is a popular metric to study memorization, quantifying how the model's…
Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased --- the choice of words and sentence…
In this paper, we collect an anthology of 100 visual stories from authors who participated in our systematic creative process of improvised story-building based on image sequences. Following close reading and thematic analysis of our…
Research on storytelling over the last 100 years has distinguished at least two levels of narrative representation (1) story, or fabula; and (2) discourse, or sujhet. We use this distinction to create Fabula Tales, a computational framework…
Causal inference seeks to identify cause-and-effect interactions in coupled systems. A recently proposed method by Liang detects causal relations by quantifying the direction and magnitude of information flow between time series. The…
Long-running, high-impact events such as the Boston Marathon bombing often develop through many stages and involve a large number of entities in their unfolding. Timeline summarization of an event by key sentences eases story digestion, but…
We investigate what distinguishes reported dreams from other personal narratives. The continuity hypothesis, stemming from psychological dream analysis work, states that most dreams refer to a person's daily life and personal concerns,…
We propose an information-theoretic framework to measure narratives, providing a formalism to understand pivotal moments, cliffhangers, and plot twists. This approach offers creatives and AI researchers tools to analyse and benchmark human-…
We conduct a review to assess how the simulation of repeated or recurrent events are planned. For such multivariate time-to-events, it is well established that the underlying mechanism is likely to be complex and to involve in particular…
An important and difficult challenge in building computational models for narratives is the automatic evaluation of narrative quality. Quality evaluation connects narrative understanding and generation as generation systems need to evaluate…
Generative AI has achieved remarkable empirical success, but from the perspective of statistics it often remains opaque: its predictions may be accurate, yet the underlying mechanism is difficult to interpret, analyze, and trust. This book…