RESEARCH

NLP

Hierarchical Neural Story Generation

July 15, 2018

Abstract

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 hierarchical story generation, where the model first generates a premise, and then transforms it into a passage of text. We gain further improvements with a novel form of model fusion that improves the relevance of the story to the prompt, and adding a new gated multi-scale self-attention mechanism to model long-range context. Experiments show large improvements over strong baselines on both automated and human evaluations. Human judges prefer stories generated by our approach to those from a strong non-hierarchical model by a factor of two to one.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Angela Fan

Michael Lewis

Yann Dauphin

Publisher

ACL

Related Publications

May 06, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models

Hubert Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy Rapin, Marlene Careil, Yohann Benchetrit, Jarod Levy, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Katelyn Begany, Teon Brooks, Jean-Rémi King

May 06, 2026

May 04, 2026

NLP

Compute Optimal Tokenization

Tomasz Limisiewicz, Artidoro Pagnoni, Srini Iyer, Mike Lewis, Sachin Mehta, Alisa Liu, Margaret Li, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer

May 04, 2026

April 16, 2026

RESEARCH

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents

Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicolas Baldwin, Edan Toledo, Rishi Hazra, Michael Kuchnik, Bassel Al Omari, Thomas Simon Foster, Anton Protopopov, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Michael Shvartsman, Alisia Lupidi, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Parth Pathak, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Hela Momand, Derek Dunfield, Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Carole-Jean Wu, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, Martin Josifoski

April 16, 2026

March 24, 2026

NLP

OPEN SOURCE

HyperAgents

Jenny Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Winnie Yang, Jakob Foerster, Sam Devlin, Tatiana Shavrina

March 24, 2026

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.