Natural Language Generation and Creative Writing A Systematic Review

Abstract

Among studies on natural language generation (NLG), computational creativity, and human-computer interaction; there is a vision of witnessing these tools collaborating with humans in generating and authoring creative content. This study aims to systematically review published studies discussing creative writing and story generation during the period of 2016-2021. This work seeks to identify the primary research methods used in NLG and creative writing studies, to locate how these studies are distributed geographically, and finally, to classify the subfields or common keywords primarily used in NLG involving creative writing. The findings suggest that experiment studies and problem-solving were the most common research methods in NLG and creative writing. Major identified themes in the reviewed articles include story generation, language models, and co-creativity, along with some gaps in foreign language translation and humour generation studies. The majority of the studies suggest that NLG tasks had a positive impact on creative writing. Common tasks related to NLG and creative writing are typically using keywords such as story generation, co-creativity, co-writing, user interface and writing tools. In future work, we aim to explore more GPT-3 capabilities in creative writing, in addition to creative writing applications in foreign language translation tasks.