  Current work on image-based story generation suffers from the fact that the
existing image sequence collections do not have coherent plots behind them. We
improve visual story generation by producing a new image-grounded dataset,
Visual Writing Prompts (VWP). VWP contains almost 2K selected sequences of
movie shots, each including 5-10 images. The image sequences are aligned with a
total of 12K stories which were collected via crowdsourcing given the image
sequences and a set of grounded characters from the corresponding image
sequence. Our new image sequence collection and filtering process has allowed
us to obtain stories that are more coherent and have more narrativity compared
to previous work. We also propose a character-based story generation model
driven by coherence as a strong baseline. Evaluations show that our generated
stories are more coherent, visually grounded, and have more narrativity than
stories generated with the current state-of-the-art model.
