arXiv Machine Learning

Narrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts

The paper introduces Narrative Consolidation, a new NLP task that aims to merge overlapping narrative documents—such as legal testimonies or historical accounts—into a single, chronologically coherent text, rather than merely compressing them. It defines the task, proposes an evaluation framework, and presents the Gospel Consolidation Language Resource, a benchmark built from the four Biblical Gospels with 169 canonical events and cross‑document alignments. Experiments show that providing an explicit temporal backbone dramatically improves performance, a simple length heuristic outperforms graph‑based methods, and temporal edges are the key discriminative signal.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Narrative Knowledge Weaver: Narrative-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Form Text Understanding

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 Computation and Language
Sep 7

NS-ST-GraphRAG: Neuro-Symbolic Spatio-Temporal GraphRAG for Literary Knowledge Processing

NS-ST-GraphRAG is a neuro‑symbolic spatio‑temporal GraphRAG framework designed to process long‑form literary narratives by integrating ontology‑guided extraction, deterministic constraint checking, dual temporal coordinates, spatial scene attributes, and dynamic sub‑graph retrieval. It selects the appropriate graph state based on the temporal and spatial scope of a query, grounding generated answers in traceable evidence. The authors also introduce Red‑Chamber‑QA, an open multi‑hop question‑answering benchmark for classical Chinese literature, and report that NS‑ST‑GraphRAG outperforms a frozen‑window baseline and a closed‑book model on a held‑out 120‑question split.

By Zheng Kui Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Pair-Level Essay-Scale Republication and Reuse from Fragmented Historical Text Reuse: A Workflow Study on Eighteenth-Century Books and Newspapers

This study tackles the challenge of identifying essay‑scale republication and reuse from fragmented text evidence, focusing on David Hume essays in eighteenth‑century books and newspapers. It compares a staged rule‑based workflow, baseline decision‑tree and LLM approaches, and automated rule adaptation, finding that pair‑level feature aggregation achieves high F1 scores and that the final workflow offers the best precision‑recall balance. Manual audits confirm all predicted positives as genuine republications, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness in producing compact, auditable candidate sets for historical analysis.

By Ke Shu, Kira Hinderks, Eetu M\"akel\"a, Mikko Tolonen
arXiv AI
Jul 8

Narrative World Model: Narratology-Grounded Writer Memory for Long-Form Fiction

arXiv:2607. 05577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-form fiction writers need memory that answers multi-hop questions about evolving story state: who knows a secret and when they learned it, whether an event preceded the narration that revealed it, whether a setup paid off, and how a relationship shifted.

By Mohammad Saifullah, Thomas Kornmaier, Taaha Kazi, Vasu Sharma, Aditya Sanjiv Kanade, Aanand Kumar Yadav
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

From Repetition to Recognition: Inductive Discovery of Disinformation Narratives

The paper introduces a three-tier evaluation framework—recovery, mining, and discovery—for unsupervised narrative label generation in disinformation datasets. It compares clustering-based and graph-community-based pipelines across seven datasets, finding that clustering can underrepresent prominent topics while graph methods produce many singletons that human annotators recognize as valid narratives. The authors release human-validated narrative candidate labels for the Climate Obstruction and PolyNarrative datasets to aid taxonomy development and dataset expansion.

By Max Upravitelev, Veronika Solopova, Jing Yang, Charlott Jakob, Alexandra Tsiakalou, Neda Foroutan, Vera Schmitt
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