@inproceedings{yang-etal-2023-doc,
    title = "{DOC}: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control",
    author = "Yang, Kevin  and
      Klein, Dan  and
      Peng, Nanyun  and
      Tian, Yuandong",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.190",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.190",
    pages = "3378--3465",
    abstract = "We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5{\%} absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2{\%}), and interestingness (20.7{\%}). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.",
}

We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5{\%} absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2{\%}), and interestingness (20.7{\%}). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.
Yang, Kevin Klein, Dan Peng, Nanyun Tian, Yu ong
DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control