arXiv Computation and Language

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.

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 AI
Oct 7

STRUCTURALCOST: A controlled reading time dataset for modeling human sentence processing difficulty

STRUCTURALCOST is a self‑paced reading dataset comprising 475 participants and 40,800 observations that isolates the processing cost of long‑distance subject‑verb dependency resolution. The study replicates a known psycholinguistic finding at NLP scale: human reading times at the main verb increase with dependency length, driven by syntactic embedding beyond linear distance. Various language models—n‑gram, SSMs, and transformers—partially mirror this graded difficulty profile but consistently underestimate the integration cost humans incur, a gap that persists across architectures and model sizes.

By Nina Nusbaumer, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Corentin Bel, Christophe Pallier, Guillaume Wisniewski, Beno\^it Crabb\'e
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

FrameBench:A Language Understanding Benchmark Based on Frame Semantics

FrameBench is a new benchmark that evaluates language models on their ability to distinguish semantic frames evoked by the same verb in different contexts, using multiple-choice questions grounded in FrameNet-style resources for English and Japanese. The dataset is generated and verified through a pipeline that incorporates native-speaker judgments, and the authors provide both the data and the code for construction and evaluation. Experiments show that small models struggle with this task, while several large models outperform human reference scores.

By Chihiro Yano, Ryohei Sasano
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 AI
Aug 14

NARU: A Benchmark for NARrative Evolution and Cultural Nuance Understanding in Japanese Extreme Long Video

arXiv:2608. 13210v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form video understanding encompasses tasks that go beyond retrieving isolated events, including tracking an evolving narrative and interpreting social meaning that may remain implicit.

By Yuheng Huang, Jianlang Chen, Jiayang Song, Hua Qi, Aza Kai, Vincent Markert, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Jianjun Zhao, Lei Ma