The Effect of Different Writing Tasks on Linguistic Style: A Case Study of the ROC Story Cloze Task

摘要

A writer's style depends not just on personal traits but also on her intentand mental state. In this paper, we show how variants of the same writing taskcan lead to measurable differences in writing style. We present a case studybased on the story cloze task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016a), where annotatorswere assigned similar writing tasks with different constraints: (1) writing anentire story, (2) adding a story ending for a given story context, and (3)adding an incoherent ending to a story. We show that a simple linear classifierinformed by stylistic features is able to successfully distinguish among thethree cases, without even looking at the story context. In addition, combiningour stylistic features with language model predictions reaches state of the artperformance on the story cloze challenge. Our results demonstrate thatdifferent task framings can dramatically affect the way people write.