arXiv Computation and Language

Language Models Have Interpretable Narrative Mechanisms

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

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.

By Teagan Johnson, Elliott Ash, Andrew Piper, Maria Antoniak
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Using LMs to Model the Effects of Context and Coreference during Sentence Comprehension

The study examines how varying the context window size of GPT‑2 affects its alignment with human reading-time data. A U‑shaped relationship is found: very short windows (<20 tokens) capture local memory limits, while larger windows (500–1,000 tokens) provide the best overall fit. Counterfactual experiments that disrupt cross‑sentential coreference chains show that these long‑range coreference relations are crucial for the improved fit of larger context windows.

By Kohei Kajikawa, Lin Ai, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Entity tracking emerges in sub-billion parameter language models and exceeds human performance in naturalistic narratives

The study investigates how language models track entities across discourse, comparing them to human performance using naturalistic narratives. It finds that humans experience a decline in entity tracking only with increased narrative complexity, not length. Remarkably, language models with as few as 410 million parameters already match human-level tracking, and larger models surpass human performance, indicating that this core linguistic skill emerges at smaller scales than previously believed.

By Karolina Dro\.zd\.z, Micha Heilbron