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:2606. 05724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form narrative QA requires reasoning over evolving story worlds rather than isolated passages: answers may depend on earlier goals, changing character states, social relations, causal triggers, temporal position, and later consequences.
By Qiuyu Tian, Fengyi Chen, Yiding Li, Youyong Kong, Fan Guo, Yuyao Li, Jinjing Shen, Zhijing Xie, Yiyun Luo, Xin Zhang, Yingce Xia, Zequn Liu
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...
By Eftekhar Hossain, John Salvador, Santu Karmaker
arXiv:2601. 17226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data.
By David Y. Liu, Xanthe Muston, Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi, Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson
arXiv:2606. 27598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) assigns highly specific types to entity mentions, but current approaches struggle with types in the long tail.
By Mreedul Gupta, Advait Deshmukh, Ashwin Umadi, Matt Pauk, Maria Leonor Pacheco
arXiv:2605.27156v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, particularly for long-tail do...
By Ruikang Zhang, Zhanni Chen, Yiqiao Cai, Qi Su
arXiv:2607. 00009v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the remarkable proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in basic writing assistance, their utility in creative writing is fundamentally hindered by a persistent binary failure.
By Mingzhe Lu, Yanbing Liu, Jiayue Wu, Jiarui Zhang, Qihao Wang, Yue Hu, Yunpeng Li, Yangyan Xu
arXiv:2609.06611v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Assessing the literary quality of narratives requires evaluating interpretive dimensions (cultural representation, emotional depth, and philosophical...
By Tianyu Wang, Nianjun Zhou
The paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) construct fictional worlds, specifically examining setting as a measurable aspect of storyworld creation. By generating 1,000 AI stories per model in English and German and comparing them to human-authored fiction from Project Gutenberg, the authors classify narrative space into five categories—action, perceived, visual, descriptive, and no space—using fine‑tuned BERT classifiers. Results show that human texts mainly use action space, grounding narratives in character-environment interaction, while LLMs consistently overproduce perceived space, focusing on atmosphere and affect, with this pattern varying by model and language.
By Katrin Rohrbacher, Bj\"orn Nieth, Emmanuelle Salin, Bjoern Eskofier, Michaela Mahlberg
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.
By Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Sil Hamilton, David Mimno, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan
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.
By Thennal DK, Hans Ole Hatzel
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.
By Cody Kommers, Sarah G Immel, Drew Hemment, Mina Lee