The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) engage with long-form narratives by comparing their generated novel summaries to human-authored ones. Researchers align sentences from 150 human-written summaries to specific chapters, highlighting the challenge of this alignment task and the complexity of summarization. They find stylistic differences and that LLMs tend to focus more on the ends of texts, suggesting insights into why models may struggle with narrative comprehension.
arXiv:2605. 17064v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are optimized for instruction following and agentic tasks remain poorly aligned with the requirements of high-quality creative writing.
arXiv:2609.38406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Access to real-world information is often noisy and fragmented. Constructing a coherent narrative from such fragments requires models to reconstruct mi...
arXiv:2606. 17350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested.
The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.
arXiv:2606. 08000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The progress of large language models (LLMs) has fueled claims that model-generated summaries rival or even surpass human-written references, raising questions about whether summarization remains an open research problem.
arXiv:2609.00241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long documents often distribute important information across extensive narrative passages and multiple tables, making faithful summarization particular...
arXiv:2602. 15851v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks.
arXiv:2412. 15239v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Consumers' engagement with stories is shaped by their expectations about what will happen next, yet modeling these forward-looking beliefs over unstructured narrative content has remained challenging.
The paper presents a detailed examination of narrative elements—agency, setting, and events—within the Dolma web-scale pretraining corpus. Using a framework of 11 interpretable dimensions, the authors hand‑annotated 400 passages, expanded this to a 25,000‑passage LLM‑labeled dataset, and trained NarraBERT models to predict narrative features across 13 million passages, producing the NarraDolma dataset. The study reveals that narrative structure is measurable at scale and that narrative qualities vary unevenly across different data sources, topics, and formats, highlighting gaps in current data curation practices.
The paper introduces CARPAS, a new task that dynamically refines user-provided aspects for aspect-based summarization in large language models (LLMs). It presents three new datasets and evaluates four prompting strategies, finding that LLMs tend to over-generate aspects, leading to overly long and misaligned summaries. To address this, the authors propose a two-stage framework that first generates lightweight scope guidance before aspect refinement and summarization, which improves focus, reduces over-generation, and enhances performance across all datasets.
The House with a Million Windows (HWAMW) is an LLM-based interactive fiction system that lets users narrate a story and then view it through a series of AI-generated "windows" that reframe the narrative in various literary styles. The system is grounded in the psychological restorying intervention, aiming to deepen users' exploration of meaning in their personal stories. Empirical results indicate that HWAMW enhances users' sense of narrative identity, and expert reviews suggest it achieves this by facilitating restorying rather than simply generating new content.
arXiv:2603. 16410v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Creative plot generation presents a fundamental challenge for language models: transforming a concise premise into a coherent narrative that sustains global coherence, character development, pacing, tone consistency, and emotional progression.