Description
COMP 550 Reading Assignment 3
Read the following paper and write a critical summary of it:
Fan, Angela, Mike Lewis, and Yann Dauphin. “Hierarchical neural story generation.” ACL 2018.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04833
Your summary should include a description of the paper’s contents, its strengths and limitations, and
any points that you did not understand. I expect that there will be concepts that you do not understand!
Do not worry, and document this in your write-up.
Also, discuss the following issues in your write-up:
1. How does the model in this paper attempt to enforce a coherent discourse in the generated
output? To what extent was this successful, in your opinion?
2. What are the methods used to evaluate the proposed model’s performance in this paper? What
are the strengths and limitations of these evaluations
3. What does it mean for a language generation system to be creative? Is it possible for an
approach based on supervised learning to achieve creativity?
Your summary should be at most 1 page. It will be graded on the basis of its coverage, linguistic quality,
and clarity of argumentation.
Resources
• Jason Eisner’s guide to reading papers: https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-read-apaper.html
