Title: Writing Stories with a Machine in the Loop
Advisors: Noah Smith and Yejin Choi
Abstract: Machine-in-the-loop creative writing systems offer suggestions to writers with the goal of sparking creativity and alleviating writer's block. We performed a user study that asked people to write stories with a machine-in-the-loop system to investigate what people want in the suggestions they receive and in their interaction with the machine. In this talk, I present the results of the user study and how it motivates directions for improving machine-in-the-loop creative writing systems. These directions include improvements to the structure of the interaction and to the models providing suggestions to writers. In particular, I will focus on a model that uses entities as context to generate text that shows promise for a collaborative story writing setting.