Daily Papers

The generation of a long story consisting of several thousand words is a sub-task in the field of long text generation~(LTG). Previous research has addressed this challenge through outline-based generation, which employs a multi-stage method for generating outlines into stories. However, this approach suffers from two common issues: almost inevitable theme drift caused by the loss of memory of previous outlines, and tedious plots with incoherent logic that are less appealing to human readers. In this paper, we propose the multi-agent Story Generator structure to improve the multi-stage method, using large language models~(LLMs) as the core components of agents. To avoid theme drift, we introduce a memory storage model comprising two components: a long-term memory storage that identifies the most important memories, thereby preventing theme drift; and a short-term memory storage that retains the latest outlines from each generation round. To incorporate engaging elements into the story, we design a story theme obstacle framework based on literary narratology theory that introduces uncertain factors and evaluation criteria to generate outline. This framework calculates the similarity of the former storyline and enhances the appeal of the story by building a knowledge graph and integrating new node content. Additionally, we establish a multi-agent interaction stage to simulate writer-reader interaction through dialogue and revise the story text according to feedback, to ensure it remains consistent and logical. Evaluations against previous methods demonstrate that our approach can generate higher-quality long stories.

Computational narrative analysis aims to capture rhythm, tension, and emotional dynamics in literary texts. Existing large language models can generate long stories but overly focus on causal coherence, neglecting the complex story arcs and orchestration inherent in human narratives. This creates a structural misalignment between model- and human-generated narratives. We propose VISTA Space, a high-dimensional representational framework for narrative orchestration that unifies human and model narrative perspectives. We further introduce LitVISTA, a structurally annotated benchmark grounded in literary texts, enabling systematic evaluation of models' narrative orchestration capabilities. We conduct oracle evaluations on a diverse selection of frontier LLMs, including GPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. Results reveal systematic deficiencies: existing models fail to construct a unified global narrative view, struggling to jointly capture narrative function and structure. Furthermore, even advanced thinking modes yield only limited gains for such literary narrative understanding.

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement over our dense retriever.

We present the task of modeling information propagation in literature, in which we seek to identify pieces of information passing from character A to character B to character C, only given a description of their activity in text. We describe a new pipeline for measuring information propagation in this domain and publish a new dataset for speaker attribution, enabling the evaluation of an important component of this pipeline on a wider range of literary texts than previously studied. Using this pipeline, we analyze the dynamics of information propagation in over 5,000 works of fiction, finding that information flows through characters that fill structural holes connecting different communities, and that characters who are women are depicted as filling this role much more frequently than characters who are men.

Reader reviews of literary fiction on social media, especially those in persistent, dedicated forums, create and are in turn driven by underlying narrative frameworks. In their comments about a novel, readers generally include only a subset of characters and their relationships, thus offering a limited perspective on that work. Yet in aggregate, these reviews capture an underlying narrative framework comprised of different actants (people, places, things), their roles, and interactions that we label the "consensus narrative framework". We represent this framework in the form of an actant-relationship story graph. Extracting this graph is a challenging computational problem, which we pose as a latent graphical model estimation problem. Posts and reviews are viewed as samples of sub graphs/networks of the hidden narrative framework. Inspired by the qualitative narrative theory of Greimas, we formulate a graphical generative Machine Learning (ML) model where nodes represent actants, and multi-edges and self-loops among nodes capture context-specific relationships. We develop a pipeline of interlocking automated methods to extract key actants and their relationships, and apply it to thousands of reviews and comments posted on Goodreads.com. We manually derive the ground truth narrative framework from SparkNotes, and then use word embedding tools to compare relationships in ground truth networks with our extracted networks. We find that our automated methodology generates highly accurate consensus narrative frameworks: for our four target novels, with approximately 2900 reviews per novel, we report average coverage/recall of important relationships of > 80% and an average edge detection rate of >89\%. These extracted narrative frameworks can generate insight into how people (or classes of people) read and how they recount what they have read to others.

As language models become capable of processing increasingly long and complex texts, there has been growing interest in their application within computational literary studies. However, evaluating the usefulness of these models for such tasks remains challenging due to the cost of fine-grained annotation for long-form texts and the data contamination concerns inherent in using public-domain literature. Current embedding similarity datasets are not suitable for evaluating literary-domain tasks because of a focus on coarse-grained similarity and primarily on very short text. We assemble and release FICSIM, a dataset of long-form, recently written fiction, including scores along 12 axes of similarity informed by author-produced metadata and validated by digital humanities scholars. We evaluate a suite of embedding models on this task, demonstrating a tendency across models to focus on surface-level features over semantic categories that would be useful for computational literary studies tasks. Throughout our data-collection process, we prioritize author agency and rely on continual, informed author consent.

No two authors write alike. Personal flourishes invoked in written narratives, from lexicon to rhetorical devices, imply a particular author--what literary theorists label the implied or virtual author; distinct from the real author or narrator of a text. Early large language models trained on unfiltered training sets drawn from a variety of discordant sources yielded incoherent personalities, problematic for conversational tasks but proving useful for sampling literature from multiple perspectives. Successes in alignment research in recent years have allowed researchers to impose subjectively consistent personae on language models via instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), but whether aligned models retain the ability to model an arbitrary virtual author has received little scrutiny. By studying 4,374 stories sampled from three OpenAI language models, we show successive versions of GPT-3 suffer from increasing degrees of "mode collapse" whereby overfitting the model during alignment constrains it from generalizing over authorship: models suffering from mode collapse become unable to assume a multiplicity of perspectives. Our method and results are significant for researchers seeking to employ language models in sociological simulations.

We evaluate recent Large language Models (LLMs) on the challenging task of summarizing short stories, which can be lengthy, and include nuanced subtext or scrambled timelines. Importantly, we work directly with authors to ensure that the stories have not been shared online (and therefore are unseen by the models), and to obtain informed evaluations of summary quality using judgments from the authors themselves. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis grounded in narrative theory, we compare GPT-4, Claude-2.1, and LLama-2-70B. We find that all three models make faithfulness mistakes in over 50% of summaries and struggle to interpret difficult subtext. However, at their best, the models can provide thoughtful thematic analysis of stories. We additionally demonstrate that LLM judgments of summary quality do not match the feedback from the writers.

We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories' complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an ``asking-why'' prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative's complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.

Recent advances in large language models have created new opportunities for stylometry, the study of writing styles and authorship. Two challenges, however, remain central: training generative models when no paired data exist, and evaluating stylistic text without relying only on human judgment. In this work, we present a framework for both generating and evaluating sentences in the style of 19th-century novelists. Large language models are fine-tuned with minimal, single-token prompts to produce text in the voices of authors such as Dickens, Austen, Twain, Alcott, and Melville. To assess these generative models, we employ a transformer-based detector trained on authentic sentences, using it both as a classifier and as a tool for stylistic explanation. We complement this with syntactic comparisons and explainable AI methods, including attention-based and gradient-based analyses, to identify the linguistic cues that drive stylistic imitation. Our findings show that the generated text reflects the authors' distinctive patterns and that AI-based evaluation offers a reliable alternative to human assessment. All artifacts of this work are published online.

Personal narratives are stories authors construct to make meaning of their experiences. Style, the distinctive way authors use language to express themselves, is fundamental to how these narratives convey subjective experiences. Yet there is a lack of a formal framework for systematically analyzing these stylistic choices. We present a novel approach that formalizes style in personal narratives as patterns in the linguistic choices authors make when communicating subjective experiences. Our framework integrates three domains: functional linguistics establishes language as a system of meaningful choices, computer science provides methods for automatically extracting and analyzing sequential patterns, and these patterns are linked to psychological observations. Using language models, we automatically extract linguistic features such as processes, participants, and circumstances. We apply our framework to hundreds of dream narratives, including a case study on a war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. Analysis of his narratives uncovers distinctive patterns, particularly how verbal processes dominate over mental ones, illustrating the relationship between linguistic choices and psychological states.

Story ideation is a critical part of the story-writing process. It is challenging to support computationally due to its exploratory and subjective nature. Tropes, which are recurring narrative elements across stories, are essential in stories as they shape the structure of narratives and our understanding of them. In this paper, we propose to use tropes as an intermediate representation of stories to approach story ideation. We present TaleStream, a canvas system that uses tropes as building blocks of stories while providing steerable suggestions of story ideas in the form of tropes. Our trope suggestion methods leverage data from the tvtropes.org wiki. We find that 97% of the time, trope suggestions generated by our methods provide better story ideation materials than random tropes. Our system evaluation suggests that TaleStream can support writers' creative flow and greatly facilitates story development. Tropes, as a rich lexicon of narratives with available examples, play a key role in TaleStream and hold promise for story-creation support systems.

Current Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate a critical gap between surface-level recognition and deep narrative reasoning when processing sequential visual storytelling. Through a comprehensive investigation of manga narrative understanding, we reveal that while recent large multimodal models excel at individual panel interpretation, they systematically fail at temporal causality and cross-panel cohesion, core requirements for coherent story comprehension. We introduce a novel evaluation framework that combines fine-grained multimodal annotation, cross-modal embedding analysis, and retrieval-augmented assessment to systematically characterize these limitations. Our methodology includes (i) a rigorous annotation protocol linking visual elements to narrative structure through aligned light novel text, (ii) comprehensive evaluation across multiple reasoning paradigms, including direct inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and (iii) cross-modal similarity analysis revealing fundamental misalignments in current VLMs' joint representations. Applying this framework to Re:Zero manga across 11 chapters with 308 annotated panels, we conduct the first systematic study of long-form narrative understanding in VLMs through three core evaluation axes: generative storytelling, contextual dialogue grounding, and temporal reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that current models lack genuine story-level intelligence, struggling particularly with non-linear narratives, character consistency, and causal inference across extended sequences. This work establishes both the foundation and practical methodology for evaluating narrative intelligence, while providing actionable insights into the capability of deep sequential understanding of Discrete Visual Narratives beyond basic recognition in Multimodal Models. Project Page: https://re-verse.vercel.app

Comics have long been a popular form of storytelling, offering visually engaging narratives that captivate audiences worldwide. However, the visual nature of comics presents a significant barrier for visually impaired readers, limiting their access to these engaging stories. In this work, we provide a pragmatic solution to this accessibility challenge by developing an automated system that generates text-based literary narratives from manga comics. Our approach aims to create an evocative and immersive prose that not only conveys the original narrative but also captures the depth and complexity of characters, their interactions, and the vivid settings in which they reside. To this end we make the following contributions: (1) We present a unified model, Magiv3, that excels at various functional tasks pertaining to comic understanding, such as localising panels, characters, texts, and speech-bubble tails, performing OCR, grounding characters etc. (2) We release human-annotated captions for over 3300 Japanese comic panels, along with character grounding annotations, and benchmark large vision-language models in their ability to understand comic images. (3) Finally, we demonstrate how integrating large vision-language models with Magiv3, can generate seamless literary narratives that allows visually impaired audiences to engage with the depth and richness of comic storytelling.

Automated storytelling has long captured the attention of researchers for the ubiquity of narratives in everyday life. However, it is challenging to maintain coherence and stay on-topic toward a specific ending when generating narratives with neural language models. In this paper, we introduce Story generation with Reader Models (StoRM), a framework in which a reader model is used to reason about the story should progress. A reader model infers what a human reader believes about the concepts, entities, and relations about the fictional story world. We show how an explicit reader model represented as a knowledge graph affords story coherence and provides controllability in the form of achieving a given story world state goal. Experiments show that our model produces significantly more coherent and on-topic stories, outperforming baselines in dimensions including plot plausibility and staying on topic.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable creative abilities in generating literary texts, including poetry and short stories. However, prior research has primarily centered on English, with limited exploration of non-English literary traditions and without standardized methods for assessing creativity. In this paper, we evaluate the capacity of LLMs to generate Persian literary text enriched with culturally relevant expressions. We build a dataset of user-generated Persian literary spanning 20 diverse topics and assess model outputs along four creativity dimensions-originality, fluency, flexibility, and elaboration-by adapting the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. To reduce evaluation costs, we adopt an LLM as a judge for automated scoring and validate its reliability against human judgments using intraclass correlation coefficients, observing strong agreement. In addition, we analyze the models' ability to understand and employ four core literary devices: simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and antithesis. Our results highlight both the strengths and limitations of LLMs in Persian literary text generation, underscoring the need for further refinement.

This paper presents a systematic defense of large language model (LLM) hallucinations or 'confabulations' as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall. The standard view is that confabulations are inherently problematic and AI research should eliminate this flaw. In this paper, we argue and empirically demonstrate that measurable semantic characteristics of LLM confabulations mirror a human propensity to utilize increased narrativity as a cognitive resource for sense-making and communication. In other words, it has potential value. Specifically, we analyze popular hallucination benchmarks and reveal that hallucinated outputs display increased levels of narrativity and semantic coherence relative to veridical outputs. This finding reveals a tension in our usually dismissive understandings of confabulation. It suggests, counter-intuitively, that the tendency for LLMs to confabulate may be intimately associated with a positive capacity for coherent narrative-text generation.

The paper proposes a framework that combines behavioral and computational experiments employing fictional prompts as a novel tool for investigating cultural artifacts and social biases in storytelling both by humans and generative AI. The study analyzes 250 stories authored by crowdworkers in June 2019 and 80 stories generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in March 2023 by merging methods from narratology and inferential statistics. Both crowdworkers and large language models responded to identical prompts about creating and falling in love with an artificial human. The proposed experimental paradigm allows a direct comparison between human and LLM-generated storytelling. Responses to the Pygmalionesque prompts confirm the pervasive presence of the Pygmalion myth in the collective imaginary of both humans and large language models. All solicited narratives present a scientific or technological pursuit. The analysis reveals that narratives from GPT-3.5 and particularly GPT-4 are more more progressive in terms of gender roles and sexuality than those written by humans. While AI narratives can occasionally provide innovative plot twists, they offer less imaginative scenarios and rhetoric than human-authored texts. The proposed framework argues that fiction can be used as a window into human and AI-based collective imaginary and social dimensions.

Narrative frames are a powerful way of conceptualizing and communicating complex, controversial ideas, however automated frame analysis to date has mostly overlooked this framing device. In this paper, we connect elements of narrativity with fundamental aspects of framing, and present a framework which formalizes and operationalizes such aspects. We annotate and release a data set of news articles in the climate change domain, analyze the dominance of narrative frame components across political leanings, and test LLMs in their ability to predict narrative frames and their components. Finally, we apply our framework in an unsupervised way to elicit components of narrative framing in a second domain, the COVID-19 crisis, where our predictions are congruent with prior theoretical work showing the generalizability of our approach.

The majority of available text summarization datasets include short-form source documents that lack long-range causal and temporal dependencies, and often contain strong layout and stylistic biases. While relevant, such datasets will offer limited challenges for future generations of text summarization systems. We address these issues by introducing BookSum, a collection of datasets for long-form narrative summarization. Our dataset covers source documents from the literature domain, such as novels, plays and stories, and includes highly abstractive, human written summaries on three levels of granularity of increasing difficulty: paragraph-, chapter-, and book-level. The domain and structure of our dataset poses a unique set of challenges for summarization systems, which include: processing very long documents, non-trivial causal and temporal dependencies, and rich discourse structures. To facilitate future work, we trained and evaluated multiple extractive and abstractive summarization models as baselines for our dataset.

Question Answering (QA) on narrative text poses a unique challenge to current systems, requiring a deep understanding of long, complex documents. However, the reliability of NarrativeQA, the most widely used benchmark in this domain, is hindered by noisy documents and flawed QA pairs. In this work, we introduce LiteraryQA, a high-quality subset of NarrativeQA focused on literary works. Using a human- and LLM-validated pipeline, we identify and correct low-quality QA samples while removing extraneous text from source documents. We then carry out a meta-evaluation of automatic metrics to clarify how systems should be evaluated on LiteraryQA. This analysis reveals that all n-gram-based metrics have a low system-level correlation to human judgment, while LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations, even with small open-weight models, can strongly agree with the ranking identified by humans. Finally, we benchmark a set of long-context LLMs on LiteraryQA. We release our code and data at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/LiteraryQA.

The screenplay serves as the foundation for television production, defining narrative structure, character development, and dialogue. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential in creative writing, direct end-to-end generation approaches often fail to produce well-crafted screenplays. We argue this failure stems from forcing a single model to simultaneously master two disparate capabilities: creative narrative construction and rigid format adherence. The resulting outputs may mimic superficial style but lack the deep structural integrity and storytelling substance required for professional use. To enable LLMs to generate high-quality screenplays, we introduce Dual-Stage Refinement (DSR), a decomposed framework that decouples creative narrative generation from format conversion. The first stage transforms a brief outline into rich, novel-style prose. The second stage refines this narrative into a professionally formatted screenplay. This separation enables the model to specialize in one distinct capability at each stage. A key challenge in implementing DSR is the scarcity of paired outline-to-novel training data. We address this through hybrid data synthesis: reverse synthesis deconstructs existing screenplays into structured inputs, while forward synthesis leverages these inputs to generate high-quality narrative texts as training targets. Blind evaluations by professional screenwriters show that DSR achieves a 75% win rate against strong baselines like Gemini-2.5-Pro and reaches 82.7% of human-level performance. Our work demonstrates that decomposed generation architecture with tailored data synthesis effectively specializes LLMs in complex creative domains.

With the development of artificial intelligence, particularly the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quantity and quality of automatically generated stories have significantly increased. This has led to the need for automatic story evaluation to assess the generative capabilities of computing systems and analyze the quality of both automatic-generated and human-written stories. Evaluating a story can be more challenging than other generation evaluation tasks. While tasks like machine translation primarily focus on assessing the aspects of fluency and accuracy, story evaluation demands complex additional measures such as overall coherence, character development, interestingness, etc. This requires a thorough review of relevant research. In this survey, we first summarize existing storytelling tasks, including text-to-text, visual-to-text, and text-to-visual. We highlight their evaluation challenges, identify various human criteria to measure stories, and present existing benchmark datasets. Then, we propose a taxonomy to organize evaluation metrics that have been developed or can be adopted for story evaluation. We also provide descriptions of these metrics, along with the discussion of their merits and limitations. Later, we discuss the human-AI collaboration for story evaluation and generation. Finally, we suggest potential future research directions, extending from story evaluation to general evaluations.

While acoustic expressiveness has long been studied in expressive text-to-speech (ETTS), the inherent expressiveness in text lacks sufficient attention, especially for ETTS of artistic works. In this paper, we introduce StoryTTS, a highly ETTS dataset that contains rich expressiveness both in acoustic and textual perspective, from the recording of a Mandarin storytelling show. A systematic and comprehensive labeling framework is proposed for textual expressiveness. We analyze and define speech-related textual expressiveness in StoryTTS to include five distinct dimensions through linguistics, rhetoric, etc. Then we employ large language models and prompt them with a few manual annotation examples for batch annotation. The resulting corpus contains 61 hours of consecutive and highly prosodic speech equipped with accurate text transcriptions and rich textual expressiveness annotations. Therefore, StoryTTS can aid future ETTS research to fully mine the abundant intrinsic textual and acoustic features. Experiments are conducted to validate that TTS models can generate speech with improved expressiveness when integrating with the annotated textual labels in StoryTTS.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance in open-ended story generation, but fine-grained stylistic control remains limited. Existing methods often rely on shallow cues (e.g., names or topics) to simulate authorial style, without robust evaluation. In this work, we present a training framework for style-conditioned story generation using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a custom multi-reward setup. The style reward is derived from a fine-tuned sentence transformer using authorship verification (AV) signals, combined with content and completeness scores to stabilize long-form narrative generation. We conduct experiments using fiction by Mark Twain, a prominent 19th-century American author, with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serving as the reference style exemplar. Our 8B model outperforms larger baselines such as GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4 in AV-style metrics, achieving a style score of 0.628 and competitive content quality. Results demonstrate the feasibility of agentic stylistic generation with moderate model size and task-specific training. While the output is clearly style-aligned, narrative completeness remains a challenge, indicating future work is needed to better model global coherence and story resolution.

Foreshadowing and payoff are ubiquitous narrative devices through which authors introduce commitments early in a story and resolve them through concrete, observable outcomes. However, despite advances in story generation, large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to bridge these long-range narrative dependencies, often leaving "Chekhov's guns" unfired even when the necessary context is present. Existing evaluations largely overlook this structural failure, focusing on surface-level coherence rather than the logical fulfillment of narrative setups. In this paper, we introduce Codified Foreshadowing-Payoff Generation (CFPG), a novel framework that reframes narrative quality through the lens of payoff realization. Recognizing that LLMs struggle to intuitively grasp the "triggering mechanism" of a foreshadowed event, CFPG transforms narrative continuity into a set of executable causal predicates. By mining and encoding Foreshadow-Trigger-Payoff triples from the BookSum corpus, we provide structured supervision that ensures foreshadowed commitments are not only mentioned but also temporally and logically fulfilled. Experiments demonstrate that CFPG significantly outperforms standard prompting baselines in payoff accuracy and narrative alignment. Our findings suggest that explicitly codifying narrative mechanics is essential for moving LLMs from surface-level fluency to genuine narrative competence.

This paper assesses the potential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as assistive tools in the creative writing process, by means of a single, in-depth case study. In the course of the study, we develop interactive and multi-voice prompting strategies that interleave background descriptions (scene setting, plot elements), instructions that guide composition, samples of text in the target style, and critical discussion of the given samples. We qualitatively evaluate the results from a literary critical perspective, as well as from the standpoint of computational creativity (a sub-field of artificial intelligence). Our findings lend support to the view that the sophistication of the results that can be achieved with an LLM mirrors the sophistication of the prompting.

Recent developments in natural language generation (NLG) using neural language models have brought us closer than ever to the goal of building AI-powered creative writing tools. However, most prior work on human-AI collaboration in the creative writing domain has evaluated new systems with amateur writers, typically in contrived user studies of limited scope. In this work, we commissioned 13 professional, published writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds to craft stories using Wordcraft, a text editor with built-in AI-powered writing assistance tools. Using interviews and participant journals, we discuss the potential of NLG to have significant impact in the creative writing domain--especially with respect to brainstorming, generation of story details, world-building, and research assistance. Experienced writers, more so than amateurs, typically have well-developed systems and methodologies for writing, as well as distinctive voices and target audiences. Our work highlights the challenges in building for these writers; NLG technologies struggle to preserve style and authorial voice, and they lack deep understanding of story contents. In order for AI-powered writing assistants to realize their full potential, it is essential that they take into account the diverse goals and expertise of human writers.

We consider the problem of automatically generating longer stories of over two thousand words. Compared to prior work on shorter stories, long-range plot coherence and relevance are more central challenges here. We propose the Recursive Reprompting and Revision framework (Re3) to address these challenges by (a) prompting a general-purpose language model to construct a structured overarching plan, and (b) generating story passages by repeatedly injecting contextual information from both the plan and current story state into a language model prompt. We then revise by (c) reranking different continuations for plot coherence and premise relevance, and finally (d) editing the best continuation for factual consistency. Compared to similar-length stories generated directly from the same base model, human evaluators judged substantially more of Re3's stories as having a coherent overarching plot (by 14% absolute increase), and relevant to the given initial premise (by 20%).

Digital Humanities and Computational Literary Studies apply text mining methods to investigate literature. Such automated approaches enable quantitative studies on large corpora which would not be feasible by manual inspection alone. However, due to copyright restrictions, the availability of relevant digitized literary works is limited. Derived Text Formats (DTFs) have been proposed as a solution. Here, textual materials are transformed in such a way that copyright-critical features are removed, but that the use of certain analytical methods remains possible. Contextualized word embeddings produced by transformer-encoders (like BERT) are promising candidates for DTFs because they allow for state-of-the-art performance on various analytical tasks and, at first sight, do not disclose the original text. However, in this paper we demonstrate that under certain conditions the reconstruction of the original copyrighted text becomes feasible and its publication in the form of contextualized token representations is not safe. Our attempts to invert BERT suggest, that publishing the encoder as a black box together with the contextualized embeddings is critical, since it allows to generate data to train a decoder with a reconstruction accuracy sufficient to violate copyright laws.

With the remarkable advancements in image generation and open-form text generation, the creation of interleaved image-text content has become an increasingly intriguing field. Multimodal story generation, characterized by producing narrative texts and vivid images in an interleaved manner, has emerged as a valuable and practical task with broad applications. However, this task poses significant challenges, as it necessitates the comprehension of the complex interplay between texts and images, and the ability to generate long sequences of coherent, contextually relevant texts and visuals. In this work, we propose SEED-Story, a novel method that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate extended multimodal stories. Our model, built upon the powerful comprehension capability of MLLM, predicts text tokens as well as visual tokens, which are subsequently processed with an adapted visual de-tokenizer to produce images with consistent characters and styles. We further propose multimodal attention sink mechanism to enable the generation of stories with up to 25 sequences (only 10 for training) in a highly efficient autoregressive manner. Additionally, we present a large-scale and high-resolution dataset named StoryStream for training our model and quantitatively evaluating the task of multimodal story generation in various aspects.

Generating a long story of several thousand words with narrative coherence using Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a challenging task. Previous research has addressed this challenge by proposing different frameworks that create a story plan and generate a long story based on that plan. However, these frameworks have been mainly focusing on maintaining narrative coherence in stories, often overlooking creativity in story planning and the expressiveness of the stories generated from those plans, which are desirable properties to captivate readers' interest. In this paper, we propose Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation framework (CritiCS), which is composed of plan refining stage (CrPlan) and story generation stage (CrText), to integrate a collective revision mechanism that promotes those properties into long-form story generation process. Specifically, in each stage, a group of LLM critics and one leader collaborate to incrementally refine drafts of plan and story throughout multiple rounds. Extensive human evaluation shows that the CritiCS can significantly enhance story creativity and reader engagement, while also maintaining narrative coherence. Furthermore, the design of the framework allows active participation from human writers in any role within the critique process, enabling interactive human-machine collaboration in story writing.

Dialogue-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) require powerful storytelling. The narratives of these may take years to write and typically involve a large creative team. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large generative text models to assist this process. GRIM, a prototype GRaph-based Interactive narrative visualization system for gaMes, generates a rich narrative graph with branching storylines that match a high-level narrative description and constraints provided by the designer. Game designers can interactively edit the graph by automatically generating new sub-graphs that fit the edits within the original narrative and constraints. We illustrate the use of GRIM in conjunction with GPT-4, generating branching narratives for four well-known stories with different contextual constraints.

Oscar Wilde said, "The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read." Unfortunately, The digitally archived journalism of Oscar Wilde's 19th century often has no or poor quality Optical Character Recognition (OCR), reducing the accessibility of these archives and making them unreadable both figuratively and literally. This paper helps address the issue by performing OCR on "The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition" (NCSE), an 84k-page collection of 19th-century English newspapers and periodicals, using Pixtral 12B, a pre-trained image-to-text language model. The OCR capability of Pixtral was compared to 4 other OCR approaches, achieving a median character error rate of 1%, 5x lower than the next best model. The resulting NCSE v2.0 dataset features improved article identification, high-quality OCR, and text classified into four types and seventeen topics. The dataset contains 1.4 million entries, and 321 million words. Example use cases demonstrate analysis of topic similarity, readability, and event tracking. NCSE v2.0 is freely available to encourage historical and sociological research. As a result, 21st-century readers can now share Oscar Wilde's disappointment with 19th-century journalistic standards, reading the unreadable from the comfort of their own computers.

This paper presents StoryDB - a broad multi-language dataset of narratives. StoryDB is a corpus of texts that includes stories in 42 different languages. Every language includes 500+ stories. Some of the languages include more than 20 000 stories. Every story is indexed across languages and labeled with tags such as a genre or a topic. The corpus shows rich topical and language variation and can serve as a resource for the study of the role of narrative in natural language processing across various languages including low resource ones. We also demonstrate how the dataset could be used to benchmark three modern multilanguage models, namely, mDistillBERT, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa.

Robustly evaluating the long-form storytelling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, as existing benchmarks often lack the necessary scale, diversity, or objective measures. To address this, we introduce WebNovelBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed for evaluating long-form novel generation. WebNovelBench leverages a large-scale dataset of over 4,000 Chinese web novels, framing evaluation as a synopsis-to-story generation task. We propose a multi-faceted framework encompassing eight narrative quality dimensions, assessed automatically via an LLM-as-Judge approach. Scores are aggregated using Principal Component Analysis and mapped to a percentile rank against human-authored works. Our experiments demonstrate that WebNovelBench effectively differentiates between human-written masterpieces, popular web novels, and LLM-generated content. We provide a comprehensive analysis of 24 state-of-the-art LLMs, ranking their storytelling abilities and offering insights for future development. This benchmark provides a scalable, replicable, and data-driven methodology for assessing and advancing LLM-driven narrative generation.

A compelling portrayal of characters is essential to the success of narrative writing. For readers, appreciating a character's traits requires the ability to infer their evolving beliefs, desires, and intentions over the course of a complex storyline, a cognitive skill known as Theory-of-Mind (ToM). Performing ToM reasoning in prolonged narratives requires readers to integrate historical context with current narrative information, a task at which humans excel but Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle. To systematically evaluate LLMs' ToM reasoning capability in long narratives, we construct LitCharToM, a benchmark of character-centric questions across four ToM dimensions from classic literature. Further, we introduce EvolvTrip, a perspective-aware temporal knowledge graph that tracks psychological development throughout narratives. Our experiments demonstrate that EvolvTrip consistently enhances performance of LLMs across varying scales, even in challenging extended-context scenarios. EvolvTrip proves to be particularly valuable for smaller models, partially bridging the performance gap with larger LLMs and showing great compatibility with lengthy narratives. Our findings highlight the importance of explicit representation of temporal character mental states in narrative comprehension and offer a foundation for more sophisticated character understanding. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/EvolvTrip.

In this article, we propose and apply a method to compare adaptations of the same story across different media. We tackle this task by modelling such adaptations through character networks. We compare them by leveraging two concepts at the core of storytelling: the characters involved, and the dynamics of the story. We propose several methods to match characters between media and compare their position in the networks; and perform narrative matching, i.e. match the sequences of narrative units that constitute the plots. We apply these methods to the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, by G.R.R. Martin, and its comics and TV show adaptations. Our results show that interactions between characters are not sufficient to properly match individual characters between adaptations, but that using some additional information such as character affiliation or gender significantly improves the performance. On the contrary, character interactions convey enough information to perform narrative matching, and allow us to detect the divergence between the original novels and its TV show adaptation.

A human author can write any length of story without losing coherence. Also, they always bring the story to a proper ending, an ability that current language models lack. In this work, we present the LongStory for coherent, complete, and length-controlled long story generation. LongStory introduces two novel methodologies: (1) the long and short-term contexts weight calibrator (CWC) and (2) long story structural positions (LSP). The CWC adjusts weights for long-term context Memory and short-term context Cheating, acknowledging their distinct roles. The LSP employs discourse tokens to convey the structural positions of a long story. Trained on three datasets with varied average story lengths, LongStory outperforms other baselines, including the strong story generator Plotmachine, in coherence, completeness, relevance, and repetitiveness. We also perform zero-shot tests on each dataset to assess the model's ability to predict outcomes beyond its training data and validate our methodology by comparing its performance with variants of our model.

The automatic extraction of character networks from literary texts is generally carried out using natural language processing (NLP) cascading pipelines. While this approach is widespread, no study exists on the impact of low-level NLP tasks on their performance. In this article, we conduct such a study on a literary dataset, focusing on the role of named entity recognition (NER) and coreference resolution when extracting co-occurrence networks. To highlight the impact of these tasks' performance, we start with gold-standard annotations, progressively add uniformly distributed errors, and observe their impact in terms of character network quality. We demonstrate that NER performance depends on the tested novel and strongly affects character detection. We also show that NER-detected mentions alone miss a lot of character co-occurrences, and that coreference resolution is needed to prevent this. Finally, we present comparison points with 2 methods based on large language models (LLMs), including a fully end-to-end one, and show that these models are outperformed by traditional NLP pipelines in terms of recall.

We define "visual story-writing" as using visual representations of story elements to support writing and revising narrative texts. To demonstrate this approach, we developed a text editor that automatically visualizes a graph of entity interactions, movement between locations, and a timeline of story events. Interacting with these visualizations results in suggested text edits: for example, connecting two characters in the graph creates an interaction between them, moving an entity updates their described location, and rearranging events on the timeline reorganizes the narrative sequence. Through two user studies on narrative text editing and writing, we found that visuals supported participants in planning high-level revisions, tracking story elements, and exploring story variations in ways that encourage creativity. Broadly, our work lays the foundation for writing support, not just through words, but also visuals.

Many classical fairy tales, fiction, and screenplays leverage dialogue to advance story plots and establish characters. We present the first study to explore whether machines can understand and generate dialogue in stories, which requires capturing traits of different characters and the relationships between them. To this end, we propose two new tasks including Masked Dialogue Generation and Dialogue Speaker Recognition, i.e., generating missing dialogue turns and predicting speakers for specified dialogue turns, respectively. We build a new dataset DialStory, which consists of 105k Chinese stories with a large amount of dialogue weaved into the plots to support the evaluation. We show the difficulty of the proposed tasks by testing existing models with automatic and manual evaluation on DialStory. Furthermore, we propose to learn explicit character representations to improve performance on these tasks. Extensive experiments and case studies show that our approach can generate more coherent and informative dialogue, and achieve higher speaker recognition accuracy than strong baselines.

Story-writing is a fundamental aspect of human imagination, relying heavily on creativity to produce narratives that are novel, effective, and surprising. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate high-quality stories, their creative story-writing capabilities remain under-explored. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of creativity in short story generation across 60 LLMs and 60 people using a five-sentence cue-word-based creative story-writing task. We use measures to automatically evaluate model- and human-generated stories across several dimensions of creativity, including novelty, surprise, diversity, and linguistic complexity. We also collect creativity ratings and Turing Test classifications from non-expert and expert human raters and LLMs. Automated metrics show that LLMs generate stylistically complex stories, but tend to fall short in terms of novelty, surprise and diversity when compared to average human writers. Expert ratings generally coincide with automated metrics. However, LLMs and non-experts rate LLM stories to be more creative than human-generated stories. We discuss why and how these differences in ratings occur, and their implications for both human and artificial creativity.

We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables hierarchical story generation, where the model first generates a premise, and then transforms it into a passage of text. We gain further improvements with a novel form of model fusion that improves the relevance of the story to the prompt, and adding a new gated multi-scale self-attention mechanism to model long-range context. Experiments show large improvements over strong baselines on both automated and human evaluations. Human judges prefer stories generated by our approach to those from a strong non-hierarchical model by a factor of two to one.

As in statistical physics, the concept of universality plays an important, albeit qualitative, role in the field of comparative mythology. Here we apply statistical mechanical tools to analyse the networks underlying three iconic mythological narratives with a view to identifying common and distinguishing quantitative features. Of the three narratives, an Anglo-Saxon and a Greek text are mostly believed by antiquarians to be partly historically based while the third, an Irish epic, is often considered to be fictional. Here we show that network analysis is able to discriminate real from imaginary social networks and place mythological narratives on the spectrum between them. Moreover, the perceived artificiality of the Irish narrative can be traced back to anomalous features associated with six characters. Considering these as amalgams of several entities or proxies, renders the plausibility of the Irish text comparable to the others from a network-theoretic point of view.

We introduce LAMBADA, a dataset to evaluate the capabilities of computational models for text understanding by means of a word prediction task. LAMBADA is a collection of narrative passages sharing the characteristic that human subjects are able to guess their last word if they are exposed to the whole passage, but not if they only see the last sentence preceding the target word. To succeed on LAMBADA, computational models cannot simply rely on local context, but must be able to keep track of information in the broader discourse. We show that LAMBADA exemplifies a wide range of linguistic phenomena, and that none of several state-of-the-art language models reaches accuracy above 1% on this novel benchmark. We thus propose LAMBADA as a challenging test set, meant to encourage the development of new models capable of genuine understanding of broad context in natural language text.

Style representation learning builds content-independent representations of author style in text. Stylometry, the analysis of style in text, is often performed by expert forensic linguists and no large dataset of stylometric annotations exists for training. Current style representation learning uses neural methods to disentangle style from content to create style vectors, however, these approaches result in uninterpretable representations, complicating their usage in downstream applications like authorship attribution where auditing and explainability is critical. In this work, we use prompting to perform stylometry on a large number of texts to create a synthetic dataset and train human-interpretable style representations we call LISA embeddings. We release our synthetic stylometry dataset and our interpretable style models as resources.

This study explores the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating personalized "mirror stories" that reflect and resonate with individual readers' identities, addressing the significant lack of diversity in literature. We present MirrorStories, a corpus of 1,500 personalized short stories generated by integrating elements such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, reader interest, and story moral. We demonstrate that LLMs can effectively incorporate diverse identity elements into narratives, with human evaluators identifying personalized elements in the stories with high accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation involving 26 diverse human judges, we compare the effectiveness of MirrorStories against generic narratives. We find that personalized LLM-generated stories not only outscore generic human-written and LLM-generated ones across all metrics of engagement (with average ratings of 4.22 versus 3.37 on a 5-point scale), but also achieve higher textual diversity while preserving the intended moral. We also provide analyses that include bias assessments and a study on the potential for integrating images into personalized stories.

Prior NLP work studying poetry has focused primarily on automatic poem generation and summarization. Many languages have well-studied traditions of poetic meter which enforce constraints on a poem in terms of syllable and phoneme patterns. Such advanced literary forms offer opportunities for probing deeper reasoning and language understanding in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to follow strict pre-requisites and rules. In this paper, we introduce MetricalARGS, the first taxonomy of poetry-related NLP tasks designed to evaluate LLMs on metrical poetry across four dimensions: Analysis, Retrieval, Generation, and Support. We discuss how these tasks relate to existing NLP tasks, addressing questions around datasets and evaluation metrics. Taking Telugu as our example language, we illustrate how the taxonomy can be used in practice. MetricalARGS highlights the broader possibilities for understanding the capabilities and limitations of today's LLMs through the lens of metrical poetry.

Automated plot generation is the challenge of generating a sequence of events that will be perceived by readers as the plot of a coherent story. Traditional symbolic planners plan a story from a goal state and guarantee logical causal plot coherence but rely on a library of hand-crafted actions with their preconditions and effects. This closed world setting limits the length and diversity of what symbolic planners can generate. On the other hand, pre-trained neural language models can generate stories with great diversity, while being generally incapable of ending a story in a specified manner and can have trouble maintaining coherence. In this paper, we present an approach to story plot generation that unifies causal planning with neural language models. We propose to use commonsense knowledge extracted from large language models to recursively expand a story plot in a backward chaining fashion. Specifically, our system infers the preconditions for events in the story and then events that will cause those conditions to become true. We performed automatic evaluation to measure narrative coherence as indicated by the ability to answer questions about whether different events in the story are causally related to other events. Results indicate that our proposed method produces more coherent plotlines than several strong baselines.

In this manifesto, we put forward the idea of data alchemy as a narrative device to discuss storytelling and transdisciplinarity in visualization. If data is the prima materia of modern science, how does one perform the Great Work? We use text-to-image diffusion-based generative art to develop the concept, and structure our argument in ten propositions, as if they were ten issues of a comic novel on data alchemy: Ad Disco Diffusionem. To follow the argument, the reader must immerse themselves in our miro board, and navigate a multimedia semiotic topology that includes comics, videos, code demos, and ergotic literature in a true alchemic sense. By accessing this paradigm one might find new sources of inspiration for scientific inquiry in familiar places, or get lost in the creative exploration of the unknown. Our colorful, sometimes poetic, exposition should not distract the reader from the seriousness of the ideas discussed, but ultimately it is about the journey.

We propose the task of narrative incoherence detection as a new arena for inter-sentential semantic understanding: Given a multi-sentence narrative, decide whether there exist any semantic discrepancies in the narrative flow. Specifically, we focus on the missing sentence and discordant sentence detection. Despite its simple setup, this task is challenging as the model needs to understand and analyze a multi-sentence narrative, and predict incoherence at the sentence level. As an initial step towards this task, we implement several baselines either directly analyzing the raw text (token-level) or analyzing learned sentence representations (sentence-level). We observe that while token-level modeling has better performance when the input contains fewer sentences, sentence-level modeling performs better on longer narratives and possesses an advantage in efficiency and flexibility. Pre-training on large-scale data and auxiliary sentence prediction training objective further boost the detection performance of the sentence-level model.

Visual narrative generation transforms textual narratives into sequences of images illustrating the content of the text. However, generating visual narratives that are faithful to the input text and self-consistent across generated images remains an open challenge, due to the lack of knowledge constraints used for planning the stories. In this work, we propose a new benchmark, VinaBench, to address this challenge. Our benchmark annotates the underlying commonsense and discourse constraints in visual narrative samples, offering systematic scaffolds for learning the implicit strategies of visual storytelling. Based on the incorporated narrative constraints, we further propose novel metrics to closely evaluate the consistency of generated narrative images and the alignment of generations with the input textual narrative. Our results across three generative vision models demonstrate that learning with VinaBench's knowledge constraints effectively improves the faithfulness and cohesion of generated visual narratives.

Creative story generation has long been a goal of NLP research. While existing methodologies have aimed to generate long and coherent stories, they fall significantly short of human capabilities in terms of diversity and character depth. To address this, we introduce a novel story generation framework called CCI (Character-centric Creative story generation via Imagination). CCI features two modules for creative story generation: IG (Image-Guided Imagination) and MW (Multi-Writer model). In the IG module, we utilize a text-to-image model to create visual representations of key story elements, such as characters, backgrounds, and main plots, in a more novel and concrete manner than text-only approaches. The MW module uses these story elements to generate multiple persona-description candidates and selects the best one to insert into the story, thereby enhancing the richness and depth of the narrative. We compared the stories generated by CCI and baseline models through statistical analysis, as well as human and LLM evaluations. The results showed that the IG and MW modules significantly improve various aspects of the stories' creativity. Furthermore, our framework enables interactive multi-modal story generation with users, opening up new possibilities for human-LLM integration in cultural development. Project page : https://www.2024cci.p-e.kr/

Rhymes and poems are a powerful medium for transmitting cultural norms and societal roles. However, the pervasive existence of gender stereotypes in these works perpetuates biased perceptions and limits the scope of individuals' identities. Past works have shown that stereotyping and prejudice emerge in early childhood, and developmental research on causal mechanisms is critical for understanding and controlling stereotyping and prejudice. This work contributes by gathering a dataset of rhymes and poems to identify gender stereotypes and propose a model with 97% accuracy to identify gender bias. Gender stereotypes were rectified using a Large Language Model (LLM) and its effectiveness was evaluated in a comparative survey against human educator rectifications. To summarize, this work highlights the pervasive nature of gender stereotypes in literary works and reveals the potential of LLMs to rectify gender stereotypes. This study raises awareness and promotes inclusivity within artistic expressions, making a significant contribution to the discourse on gender equality.

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis have led to large pretrained transformers with excellent capabilities to generate visualizations from a given text. However, these models are ill-suited for specialized tasks like story visualization, which requires an agent to produce a sequence of images given a corresponding sequence of captions, forming a narrative. Moreover, we find that the story visualization task fails to accommodate generalization to unseen plots and characters in new narratives. Hence, we first propose the task of story continuation, where the generated visual story is conditioned on a source image, allowing for better generalization to narratives with new characters. Then, we enhance or 'retro-fit' the pretrained text-to-image synthesis models with task-specific modules for (a) sequential image generation and (b) copying relevant elements from an initial frame. Then, we explore full-model finetuning, as well as prompt-based tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation, of the pre-trained model. We evaluate our approach StoryDALL-E on two existing datasets, PororoSV and FlintstonesSV, and introduce a new dataset DiDeMoSV collected from a video-captioning dataset. We also develop a model StoryGANc based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for story continuation, and compare it with the StoryDALL-E model to demonstrate the advantages of our approach. We show that our retro-fitting approach outperforms GAN-based models for story continuation and facilitates copying of visual elements from the source image, thereby improving continuity in the generated visual story. Finally, our analysis suggests that pretrained transformers struggle to comprehend narratives containing several characters. Overall, our work demonstrates that pretrained text-to-image synthesis models can be adapted for complex and low-resource tasks like story continuation.

Recognizing the flow of time in a story is a crucial aspect of understanding it. Prior work related to time has primarily focused on identifying temporal expressions or relative sequencing of events, but here we propose computationally annotating each line of a book with wall clock times, even in the absence of explicit time-descriptive phrases. To do so, we construct a data set of hourly time phrases from 52,183 fictional books. We then construct a time-of-day classification model that achieves an average error of 2.27 hours. Furthermore, we show that by analyzing a book in whole using dynamic programming of breakpoints, we can roughly partition a book into segments that each correspond to a particular time-of-day. This approach improves upon baselines by over two hours. Finally, we apply our model to a corpus of literature categorized by different periods in history, to show interesting trends of hourly activity throughout the past. Among several observations we find that the fraction of events taking place past 10 P.M jumps past 1880 - coincident with the advent of the electric light bulb and city lights.

What happens when a storyteller forgets its own story? Large Language Models (LLMs) can now generate narratives spanning tens of thousands of words, but they often fail to maintain consistency throughout. When generating long-form narratives, these models can contradict their own established facts, character traits, and world rules. Existing story generation benchmarks focus mainly on plot quality and fluency, leaving consistency errors largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present ConStory-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate narrative consistency in long-form story generation. It contains 2,000 prompts across four task scenarios and defines a taxonomy of five error categories with 19 fine-grained subtypes. We also develop ConStory-Checker, an automated pipeline that detects contradictions and grounds each judgment in explicit textual evidence. Evaluating a range of LLMs through five research questions, we find that consistency errors show clear tendencies: they are most common in factual and temporal dimensions, tend to appear around the middle of narratives, occur in text segments with higher token-level entropy, and certain error types tend to co-occur. These findings can inform future efforts to improve consistency in long-form narrative generation. Our project page is available at https://picrew.github.io/constory-bench.github.io/.

Generative AI has established the opportunity to readily transform content from one medium to another. This capability is especially powerful for storytelling, where visual illustrations can illuminate a story originally expressed in text. In this paper, we focus on the task of narrative scene illustration, which involves automatically generating an image depicting a scene in a story. Motivated by recent progress on text-to-image models, we consider a pipeline that uses LLMs as an interface for prompting text-to-image models to generate scene illustrations given raw story text. We apply variations of this pipeline to a prominent story corpus in order to synthesize illustrations for scenes in these stories. We conduct a human annotation task to obtain pairwise quality judgments for these illustrations. The outcome of this process is the SceneIllustrations dataset, which we release as a new resource for future work on cross-modal narrative transformation. Through our analysis of this dataset and experiments modeling illustration quality, we demonstrate that LLMs can effectively verbalize scene knowledge implicitly evoked by story text. Moreover, this capability is impactful for generating and evaluating illustrations.

Generating high-quality stories spanning thousands of tokens requires competency across a variety of skills, from tracking plot and character arcs to keeping a consistent and engaging style. Due to the difficulty of sourcing labeled datasets and precise quality measurements, most work using large language models (LLMs) for long-form story generation uses combinations of hand-designed prompting techniques to elicit author-like behavior. This is a manual process that is highly dependent on the specific story-generation task. Motivated by the recent success of applying RL with Verifiable Rewards to domains like math and coding, we propose a general story-generation task (Next-Chapter Prediction) and a reward formulation (Verified Rewards via Completion Likelihood Improvement) that allows us to use an unlabeled book dataset as a learning signal for reasoning. We learn to reason over a story's condensed information and generate a detailed plan for the next chapter. Our reasoning is evaluated via the chapters it helps a story-generator create, and compared against non-trained and supervised finetuning (SFT) baselines. Pairwise human judgments reveal the chapters our learned reasoning produces are preferred across almost all metrics, and the effect is more pronounced in Scifi and Fantasy genres.

Recent advancements in large scale text-to-image models have opened new possibilities for guiding the creation of images through human-devised natural language. However, while prior literature has primarily focused on the generation of individual images, it is essential to consider the capability of these models to ensure coherency within a sequence of images to fulfill the demands of real-world applications such as storytelling. To address this, here we present a novel neural pipeline for generating a coherent storybook from the plain text of a story. Specifically, we leverage a combination of a pre-trained Large Language Model and a text-guided Latent Diffusion Model to generate coherent images. While previous story synthesis frameworks typically require a large-scale text-to-image model trained on expensive image-caption pairs to maintain the coherency, we employ simple textual inversion techniques along with detector-based semantic image editing which allows zero-shot generation of the coherent storybook. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image editing baselines.

Writing stories is an engaging yet challenging endeavor. Often, authors encounter moments of creative block, where the path forward in their narrative becomes obscured. This paper is designed to address such moments by providing an innovative solution: A tool that completes stories based on given prompts. By inputting a short story prompt, users can receive a conclusion to their story, articulated in one sentence or more, thereby enhancing the storytelling process with AI-driven creativity. This tool aims not only to assist authors in navigating writer's block but also to offer a fun and interactive way for anyone to expand on story ideas spontaneously. Through this paper, we explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative writing, pushing the boundaries of how stories can be crafted and concluded. To create our final text-generation models, we used a pre-trained GPT-3.5 model and a newly created finetuned SSM-Mamba model, both of which perform well on a comprehensive list of metrics including BERT score, METEOR, BLEU, ROUGE, and Perplexity. The SSM model has also been made public for the NLP community on HuggingFace models as an open source contribution, which for the timebeing is a first of its kind state-space model for story-generation task on HuggingFace.

To enhance the quality of generated stories, recent story generation models have been investigating the utilization of higher-level attributes like plots or commonsense knowledge. The application of prompt-based learning with large language models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-3, has exhibited remarkable performance in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This paper conducts a comprehensive investigation, utilizing both automatic and human evaluation, to compare the story generation capacity of LLMs with recent models across three datasets with variations in style, register, and length of stories. The results demonstrate that LLMs generate stories of significantly higher quality compared to other story generation models. Moreover, they exhibit a level of performance that competes with human authors, albeit with the preliminary observation that they tend to replicate real stories in situations involving world knowledge, resembling a form of plagiarism.

In this paper, we evaluate the creative fiction writing abilities of a fine-tuned small language model (SLM), BART Large, and compare its performance to humans and two large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o. Our evaluation consists of two experiments: (i) a human evaluation where readers assess the stories generated by the SLM compared to human-written stories, and (ii) a qualitative linguistic analysis comparing the textual characteristics of the stories generated by the different models. In the first experiment, we asked 68 participants to rate short stories generated by the models and humans along dimensions such as grammaticality, relevance, creativity, and attractiveness. BART Large outperformed human writers in most aspects, except creativity, with an overall score of 2.11 compared to 1.85 for human-written texts -- a 14% improvement. In the second experiment, the qualitative analysis revealed that, while GPT-4o exhibited near-perfect internal and external coherence, it tended to produce more predictable narratives, with only 3% of its stories seen as novel. In contrast, 15% of BART's stories were considered novel, indicating a higher degree of creativity despite its smaller model size. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative insights into how model size and fine-tuning influence the balance between creativity, fluency, and coherence in creative writing tasks.

Reading stories evokes rich interpretive, affective, and evaluative responses, such as inferences about narrative intent or judgments about characters. Yet, computational models of reader response are limited, preventing nuanced analyses. To address this gap, we introduce SocialStoryFrames, a formalism for distilling plausible inferences about reader response, such as perceived author intent, explanatory and predictive reasoning, affective responses, and value judgments, using conversational context and a taxonomy grounded in narrative theory, linguistic pragmatics, and psychology. We develop two models, SSF-Generator and SSF-Classifier, validated through human surveys (N=382 participants) and expert annotations, respectively. We conduct pilot analyses to showcase the utility of the formalism for studying storytelling at scale. Specifically, applying our models to SSF-Corpus, a curated dataset of 6,140 social media stories from diverse contexts, we characterize the frequency and interdependence of storytelling intents, and we compare and contrast narrative practices (and their diversity) across communities. By linking fine-grained, context-sensitive modeling with a generic taxonomy of reader responses, SocialStoryFrames enable new research into storytelling in online communities.

Generating long-term texts such as novels using artificial intelligence has always been a challenge. A common approach is to use large language models (LLMs) to construct a hierarchical framework that first plans and then writes. Despite the fact that the generated novels reach a sufficient length, they exhibit poor logical coherence and appeal in their plots and deficiencies in character and event depiction, ultimately compromising the overall narrative quality. In this paper, we propose a method named Extracting Excelsior and Expanding. Ex3 initially extracts structure information from raw novel data. By combining this structure information with the novel data, an instruction-following dataset is meticulously crafted. This dataset is then utilized to fine-tune the LLM, aiming for excelsior generation performance. In the final stage, a tree-like expansion method is deployed to facilitate the generation of arbitrarily long novels. Evaluation against previous methods showcases Ex3's ability to produce higher-quality long-form novels.

Motivated by the recent progresses on machine learning-based models that learn artistic styles, in this paper we focus on the problem of poem generation. This is a challenging task in which the machine has to capture the linguistic features that strongly characterize a certain poet, as well as the semantics of the poet's production, that are influenced by his personal experiences and by his literary background. Since poetry is constructed using syllables, that regulate the form and structure of poems, we propose a syllable-based neural language model, and we describe a poem generation mechanism that is designed around the poet style, automatically selecting the most representative generations. The poetic work of a target author is usually not enough to successfully train modern deep neural networks, so we propose a multi-stage procedure that exploits non-poetic works of the same author, and also other publicly available huge corpora to learn syntax and grammar of the target language. We focus on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, widely famous for his Divine Comedy. A quantitative and qualitative experimental analysis of the generated tercets is reported, where we included expert judges with strong background in humanistic studies. The generated tercets are frequently considered to be real by a generic population of judges, with relative difference of 56.25\% with respect to the ones really authored by Dante, and expert judges perceived Dante's style and rhymes in the generated text.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in a wide array of generative NLP tasks, such as summarization and machine translation. In the context of narrative generation, however, existing models still do not capture factors that contribute to producing consistent text. For instance, it is logical that a piece of text or a story should be uniformly readable throughout and that this form of complexity should be controllable. As such, if the complexity of an input text prompt is rated first-grade reading level in the Flesch Reading Ease test, then the generated text continuing the plot should also be within this range of complexity. With this in mind, we introduce Uniform Complexity for Text Generation (UCTG), a new benchmark test which raises the challenge of making generative models observe uniform linguistic properties with respect to prompts. We experiment with over 150+ linguistically and cognitively motivated features for evaluating text complexity in humans and generative models. From our results, we find that models such as GPT-2 struggle to preserve the complexity of input prompts used in its generations, even if finetuned with professionally written texts.

Scholarly writing presents a complex space that generally follows a methodical procedure to plan and produce both rationally sound and creative compositions. Recent works involving large language models (LLM) demonstrate considerable success in text generation and revision tasks; however, LLMs still struggle to provide structural and creative feedback on the document level that is crucial to academic writing. In this paper, we introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes scholarly writing behaviors according to intention, writer actions, and the information types of the written data. We also provide ManuScript, an original dataset annotated with a simplified version of our taxonomy to show writer actions and the intentions behind them. Motivated by cognitive writing theory, our taxonomy for scientific papers includes three levels of categorization in order to trace the general writing flow and identify the distinct writer activities embedded within each higher-level process. ManuScript intends to provide a complete picture of the scholarly writing process by capturing the linearity and non-linearity of writing trajectory, such that writing assistants can provide stronger feedback and suggestions on an end-to-end level. The collected writing trajectories are viewed at https://minnesotanlp.github.io/REWARD_demo/

News articles are driven by the informational sources journalists use in reporting. Modeling when, how and why sources get used together in stories can help us better understand the information we consume and even help journalists with the task of producing it. In this work, we take steps toward this goal by constructing the largest and widest-ranging annotated dataset, to date, of informational sources used in news writing. We show that our dataset can be used to train high-performing models for information detection and source attribution. We further introduce a novel task, source prediction, to study the compositionality of sources in news articles. We show good performance on this task, which we argue is an important proof for narrative science exploring the internal structure of news articles and aiding in planning-based language generation, and an important step towards a source-recommendation system to aid journalists.

Fear is a universal concept; people crave it in urban legends, scary movies, and modern stories. Open questions remain, however, about why these stories are scary and more generally what scares people. In this study, we explore these questions by analyzing tens of thousands of scary stories on forums (known as subreddits) in a social media website, Reddit. We first explore how writing styles have evolved to keep these stories fresh before we analyze the stable core techniques writers use to make stories scary. We find that writers have changed the themes of their stories over years from haunted houses to school-related themes, body horror, and diseases. Yet some features remain stable; words associated with pseudo-human nouns, such as clown or devil are more common in scary stories than baselines. In addition, we collect a range of datasets that annotate sentences containing fear. We use these data to develop a high-accuracy fear detection neural network model, which is used to quantify where people express fear in scary stories. We find that sentences describing fear, and words most often seen in scary stories, spike at particular points in a story, possibly as a way to keep the readers on the edge of their seats until the story's conclusion. These results provide a new understanding of how authors cater to their readers, and how fear may manifest in stories.

AI Stories is a proposed interactive dialogue system, that lets children co-create narrative worlds through conversation. Over the next three years this system will be developed and tested within pediatric wards, where it offers a useful resource between the gap of education and play. Telling and making stories is a fundamental part of language play, and its chatty and nonsensical qualities are important; therefore, the prologued usage an automated system offers is a benefit to children. In this paper I will present the current state of this project, in its more experimental and general guise. Conceptually story-telling through dialogue relates to the preprint interpretation of story, beyond the static and linear medium, where stories were performative, temporal, and social.

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In this paper, we study the interpretation of two non-compositional figurative languages (idioms and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pre-trained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types : inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words' literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.

In this paper, we study the task of improving the cohesion and coherence of long-form text generated by language models. To this end, we propose RSTGen, a framework that utilises Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), a classical language theory, to control the discourse structure, semantics and topics of generated text. Firstly, we demonstrate our model's ability to control structural discourse and semantic features of generated text in open generation evaluation. Then we experiment on the two challenging long-form text tasks of argument generation and story generation. Evaluation using automated metrics and a metric with high correlation to human evaluation, shows that our model performs competitively against existing models, while offering significantly more controls over generated text than alternative methods.

Scientific news reports serve as a bridge, adeptly translating complex research articles into reports that resonate with the broader public. The automated generation of such narratives enhances the accessibility of scholarly insights. In this paper, we present a new corpus to facilitate this paradigm development. Our corpus comprises a parallel compilation of academic publications and their corresponding scientific news reports across nine disciplines. To demonstrate the utility and reliability of our dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis, highlighting the divergences in readability and brevity between scientific news narratives and academic manuscripts. We benchmark our dataset employing state-of-the-art text generation models. The evaluation process involves both automatic and human evaluation, which lays the groundwork for future explorations into the automated generation of scientific news reports. The dataset and code related to this work are available at https://dongqi.me/projects/SciNews.

In this paper, we introduce Narrative Learning, a methodology where models are defined entirely in natural language and iteratively refine their classification criteria using explanatory prompts rather than traditional numerical optimisation. We report on experiments to evaluate the accuracy and potential of this approach using 3 synthetic and 3 natural datasets and compare them against 7 baseline explainable machine learning models. We demonstrate that on 5 out of 6 of these datasets, Narrative Learning became more accurate than the baseline explainable models in 2025 or earlier because of improvements in language models. We also report on trends in the lexicostatistics of these models' outputs as a proxy for the comprehensibility of the explanations.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential as tools for scientific discovery. This has engendered growing interest in their use in humanistic disciplines, such as historical linguistics and literary studies. These fields often construct arguments on the basis of delineations like genre, or more inflexibly, time period. Although efforts have been made to restrict inference to specific domains via fine-tuning or model editing, we posit that the only true guarantee is domain-restricted pretraining -- typically, a data- and compute-expensive proposition. We show that efficient pretraining techniques can produce useful models over corpora too large for easy manual inspection but too small for "typical" LLM approaches. We employ a novel date-attribution pipeline in order to obtain a temporally-segmented dataset of five 10-million-word slices. We train two corresponding five-model batteries over these corpus segments, efficient pretraining and Llama3-8B parameter efficiently finetuned. We find that the pretrained models are faster to train than the finetuned baselines and that they better respect the historical divisions of our corpus. Emphasizing speed and precision over a-historical comprehensiveness enables a number of novel approaches to hypothesis discovery and testing in our target fields. Taking up diachronic linguistics as a testbed, we show that our method enables the detection of a diverse set of phenomena, including en masse lexical change, non-lexical (grammatical and morphological) change, and word sense introduction/obsolescence. We provide a ready-to-use pipeline that allows extension of our approach to other target fields with only minimal adaptation.

While long-context large language models (LLMs) can technically summarize book-length documents (>100K tokens), the length and complexity of the documents have so far prohibited evaluations of input-dependent aspects like faithfulness. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale human evaluation of faithfulness and content selection on LLM-generated summaries of fictional books. Our study mitigates the issue of data contamination by focusing on summaries of books published in 2023 or 2024, and we hire annotators who have fully read each book prior to the annotation task to minimize cost and cognitive burden. We collect FABLES, a dataset of annotations on 3,158 claims made in LLM-generated summaries of 26 books, at a cost of $5.2K USD, which allows us to rank LLM summarizers based on faithfulness: Claude-3-Opus significantly outperforms all closed-source LLMs, while the open-source Mixtral is on par with GPT-3.5-Turbo. An analysis of the annotations reveals that most unfaithful claims relate to events and character states, and they generally require indirect reasoning over the narrative to invalidate. While LLM-based auto-raters have proven reliable for factuality and coherence in other settings, we implement several LLM raters of faithfulness and find that none correlates strongly with human annotations, especially with regard to detecting unfaithful claims. Our experiments suggest that detecting unfaithful claims is an important future direction not only for summarization evaluation but also as a testbed for long-context understanding. Finally, we move beyond faithfulness by exploring content selection errors in book-length summarization: we develop a typology of omission errors related to crucial narrative elements and also identify a systematic over-emphasis on events occurring towards the end of the book.

Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and high computational cost, retrieval-based approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods can fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition when reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based long context comprehension towards stateful reasoning. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/EternityJune25/ComoRAG

Moral stories are a time-tested vehicle for transmitting values, yet modern NLP lacks a large, structured corpus that couples coherent narratives with explicit ethical lessons. We close this gap with TF1-EN-3M, the first open dataset of three million English-language fables generated exclusively by instruction-tuned models no larger than 8B parameters. Each story follows a six-slot scaffold (character -> trait -> setting -> conflict -> resolution -> moral), produced through a combinatorial prompt engine that guarantees genre fidelity while covering a broad thematic space. A hybrid evaluation pipeline blends (i) a GPT-based critic that scores grammar, creativity, moral clarity, and template adherence with (ii) reference-free diversity and readability metrics. Among ten open-weight candidates, an 8B-parameter Llama-3 variant delivers the best quality-speed trade-off, producing high-scoring fables on a single consumer GPU (<24 GB VRAM) at approximately 13.5 cents per 1,000 fables. We release the dataset, generation code, evaluation scripts, and full metadata under a permissive license, enabling exact reproducibility and cost benchmarking. TF1-EN-3M opens avenues for research in instruction following, narrative intelligence, value alignment, and child-friendly educational AI, demonstrating that large-scale moral storytelling no longer requires proprietary giant models.

The ability to process idiomatic or literal multiword expressions is a crucial aspect of understanding and generating any language. The task of generating contextually relevant continuations for narratives containing idiomatic (or literal) expressions can allow us to test the ability of generative language models (LMs) in understanding nuanced language containing non-compositional figurative text. We conduct a series of experiments using datasets in two distinct languages (English and Portuguese) under three different training settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned). Our results suggest that the models are only slightly better at generating continuations for literal contexts than idiomatic contexts, with exceedingly small margins. Furthermore, the models studied in this work perform equally well across both languages, indicating the robustness of generative models in performing this task.

Interactive storytelling benefits from planning and exploring multiple 'what if' scenarios. Modern LLMs are useful tools for ideation and exploration, but current chat-based user interfaces restrict users to a single linear flow. To address this limitation, we propose Narrative Studio -- a novel in-browser narrative exploration environment featuring a tree-like interface that allows branching exploration from user-defined points in a story. Each branch is extended via iterative LLM inference guided by system and user-defined prompts. Additionally, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to automatically expand promising narrative paths based on user-specified criteria, enabling more diverse and robust story development. We also allow users to enhance narrative coherence by grounding the generated text in an entity graph that represents the actors and environment of the story.

There are a few prominent practices for conducting reviews of academic literature, including searching for specific keywords on Google Scholar or checking citations from some initial seed paper(s). These approaches serve a critical purpose for academic literature reviews, yet there remain challenges in identifying relevant literature when similar work may utilize different terminology (e.g., mixed-initiative visual analytics papers may not use the same terminology as papers on model-steering, yet the two topics are relevant to one another). In this paper, we introduce a system, VitaLITy, intended to complement existing practices. In particular, VitaLITy promotes serendipitous discovery of relevant literature using transformer language models, allowing users to find semantically similar papers in a word embedding space given (1) a list of input paper(s) or (2) a working abstract. VitaLITy visualizes this document-level embedding space in an interactive 2-D scatterplot using dimension reduction. VitaLITy also summarizes meta information about the document corpus or search query, including keywords and co-authors, and allows users to save and export papers for use in a literature review. We present qualitative findings from an evaluation of VitaLITy, suggesting it can be a promising complementary technique for conducting academic literature reviews. Furthermore, we contribute data from 38 popular data visualization publication venues in VitaLITy, and we provide scrapers for the open-source community to continue to grow the list of supported venues.

Books are typically segmented into chapters and sections, representing coherent subnarratives and topics. We investigate the task of predicting chapter boundaries, as a proxy for the general task of segmenting long texts. We build a Project Gutenberg chapter segmentation data set of 9,126 English novels, using a hybrid approach combining neural inference and rule matching to recognize chapter title headers in books, achieving an F1-score of 0.77 on this task. Using this annotated data as ground truth after removing structural cues, we present cut-based and neural methods for chapter segmentation, achieving an F1-score of 0.453 on the challenging task of exact break prediction over book-length documents. Finally, we reveal interesting historical trends in the chapter structure of novels.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a tremendous capacity for generating literary text. However, their effectiveness in generating children's stories has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this study, we evaluate the trustworthiness of children's stories generated by LLMs using various measures, and we compare and contrast our results with both old and new children's stories to better assess their significance. Our findings suggest that LLMs still struggle to generate children's stories at the level of quality and nuance found in actual stories

Intrinsic dimension (ID) is an important tool in modern LLM analysis, informing studies of training dynamics, scaling behavior, and dataset structure, yet its textual determinants remain underexplored. We provide the first comprehensive study grounding ID in interpretable text properties through cross-encoder analysis, linguistic features, and sparse autoencoders (SAEs). In this work, we establish three key findings. First, ID is complementary to entropy-based metrics: after controlling for length, the two are uncorrelated, with ID capturing geometric complexity orthogonal to prediction quality. Second, ID exhibits robust genre stratification: scientific prose shows low ID (~8), encyclopedic content medium ID (~9), and creative/opinion writing high ID (~10.5) across all models tested. This reveals that contemporary LLMs find scientific text "representationally simple" while fiction requires additional degrees of freedom. Third, using SAEs, we identify causal features: scientific signals (formal tone, report templates, statistics) reduce ID; humanized signals (personalization, emotion, narrative) increase it. Steering experiments confirm these effects are causal. Thus, for contemporary models, scientific writing appears comparatively "easy", whereas fiction, opinion, and affect add representational degrees of freedom. Our multi-faceted analysis provides practical guidance for the proper use of ID and the sound interpretation of ID-based results.

Representation and learning of commonsense knowledge is one of the foundational problems in the quest to enable deep language understanding. This issue is particularly challenging for understanding casual and correlational relationships between events. While this topic has received a lot of interest in the NLP community, research has been hindered by the lack of a proper evaluation framework. This paper attempts to address this problem with a new framework for evaluating story understanding and script learning: the 'Story Cloze Test'. This test requires a system to choose the correct ending to a four-sentence story. We created a new corpus of ~50k five-sentence commonsense stories, ROCStories, to enable this evaluation. This corpus is unique in two ways: (1) it captures a rich set of causal and temporal commonsense relations between daily events, and (2) it is a high quality collection of everyday life stories that can also be used for story generation. Experimental evaluation shows that a host of baselines and state-of-the-art models based on shallow language understanding struggle to achieve a high score on the Story Cloze Test. We discuss these implications for script and story learning, and offer suggestions for deeper language understanding.

Current work on image-based story generation suffers from the fact that the existing image sequence collections do not have coherent plots behind them. We improve visual story generation by producing a new image-grounded dataset, Visual Writing Prompts (VWP). VWP contains almost 2K selected sequences of movie shots, each including 5-10 images. The image sequences are aligned with a total of 12K stories which were collected via crowdsourcing given the image sequences and a set of grounded characters from the corresponding image sequence. Our new image sequence collection and filtering process has allowed us to obtain stories that are more coherent and have more narrativity compared to previous work. We also propose a character-based story generation model driven by coherence as a strong baseline. Evaluations show that our generated stories are more coherent, visually grounded, and have more narrativity than stories generated with the current state-of-the-art model.

Text generation has become more accessible than ever, and the increasing interest in these systems, especially those using large language models, has spurred an increasing number of related publications. We provide a systematic literature review comprising 244 selected papers between 2017 and 2024. This review categorizes works in text generation into five main tasks: open-ended text generation, summarization, translation, paraphrasing, and question answering. For each task, we review their relevant characteristics, sub-tasks, and specific challenges (e.g., missing datasets for multi-document summarization, coherence in story generation, and complex reasoning for question answering). Additionally, we assess current approaches for evaluating text generation systems and ascertain problems with current metrics. Our investigation shows nine prominent challenges common to all tasks and sub-tasks in recent text generation publications: bias, reasoning, hallucinations, misuse, privacy, interpretability, transparency, datasets, and computing. We provide a detailed analysis of these challenges, their potential solutions, and which gaps still require further engagement from the community. This systematic literature review targets two main audiences: early career researchers in natural language processing looking for an overview of the field and promising research directions, as well as experienced researchers seeking a detailed view of tasks, evaluation methodologies, open challenges, and recent mitigation strategies.

Enabling engagement of manga by visually impaired individuals presents a significant challenge due to its inherently visual nature. With the goal of fostering accessibility, this paper aims to generate a dialogue transcript of a complete manga chapter, entirely automatically, with a particular emphasis on ensuring narrative consistency. This entails identifying (i) what is being said, i.e., detecting the texts on each page and classifying them into essential vs non-essential, and (ii) who is saying it, i.e., attributing each dialogue to its speaker, while ensuring the same characters are named consistently throughout the chapter. To this end, we introduce: (i) Magiv2, a model that is capable of generating high-quality chapter-wide manga transcripts with named characters and significantly higher precision in speaker diarisation over prior works; (ii) an extension of the PopManga evaluation dataset, which now includes annotations for speech-bubble tail boxes, associations of text to corresponding tails, classifications of text as essential or non-essential, and the identity for each character box; and (iii) a new character bank dataset, which comprises over 11K characters from 76 manga series, featuring 11.5K exemplar character images in total, as well as a list of chapters in which they appear. The code, trained model, and both datasets can be found at: https://github.com/ragavsachdeva/magi

In this paper we compare various text generation models' ability to write poetry in the style of early English Romanticism. These models include: Character-Level Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory, Hugging Face's GPT-2, OpenAI's GPT-3, and EleutherAI's GPT-NEO. Quality was measured based syllable count and coherence with the automatic evaluation metric GRUEN. Character-Level Recurrent Neural Networks performed far worse compared to transformer models. And, as parameter-size increased, the quality of transformer models' poems improved. These models are typically not compared in a creative context, and we are happy to contribute.

A story premise succinctly defines a story's main idea, foundation, and trajectory. It serves as the initial trigger in automatic story generation. Existing sources of story premises are limited by a lack of diversity, uneven quality, and high costs that make them difficult to scale. In response, we introduce Modular Story Premise Synthesis (MoPS) which breaks down story premises into modules like background and persona for automated design and generation. MoPS consists of three phases: (1) Precollect a consistent set of candidates for each module to form a nested dictionary. (2) Extract a key path from the nested dictionary as the premise design. (3) Instruct an LLM to integrate the design into a coherent premise sentence. Thorough evaluations demonstrate that our synthesized premises excel in diversity, fascination, completeness, and originality compared to those induced from large language models and captured from public story datasets. Similarly, the extended novels and scripts generated from our premises also exhibit higher quality. In supplementary materials, we provide the MoPS code suite, along with 7.6k generated premises and 1k extended stories. Code: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MoPS.

Story visualization (SV) is a challenging text-to-image generation task for the difficulty of not only rendering visual details from the text descriptions but also encoding a long-term context across multiple sentences. While prior efforts mostly focus on generating a semantically relevant image for each sentence, encoding a context spread across the given paragraph to generate contextually convincing images (e.g., with a correct character or with a proper background of the scene) remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a novel memory architecture for the Bi-directional Transformer framework with an online text augmentation that generates multiple pseudo-descriptions as supplementary supervision during training for better generalization to the language variation at inference. In extensive experiments on the two popular SV benchmarks, i.e., the Pororo-SV and Flintstones-SV, the proposed method significantly outperforms the state of the arts in various metrics including FID, character F1, frame accuracy, BLEU-2/3, and R-precision with similar or less computational complexity.

We propose a novel framework for generating causal graphs from narrative texts, bridging high-level causality and detailed event-specific relationships. Our method first extracts concise, agent-centered vertices using large language model (LLM)-based summarization. We introduce an "Expert Index," comprising seven linguistically informed features, integrated into a Situation-Task-Action-Consequence (STAC) classification model. This hybrid system, combining RoBERTa embeddings with the Expert Index, achieves superior precision in causal link identification compared to pure LLM-based approaches. Finally, a structured five-iteration prompting process refines and constructs connected causal graphs. Experiments on 100 narrative chapters and short stories demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 in causal graph quality, while maintaining readability. The open-source tool provides an interpretable, efficient solution for capturing nuanced causal chains in narratives.

Coherence is one of the critical factors that determine the quality of writing. We propose writing relevance (WR) training method for neural encoder-decoder natural language generation (NLG) models which improves coherence of the continuation by leveraging negative examples. WR loss regresses the vector representation of the context and generated sentence toward positive continuation by contrasting it with the negatives. We compare our approach with Unlikelihood (UL) training in a text continuation task on commonsense natural language inference (NLI) corpora to show which method better models the coherence by avoiding unlikely continuations. The preference of our approach in human evaluation shows the efficacy of our method in improving coherence.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized to assist in scientific and academic writing, helping authors enhance the coherence of their articles. Previous studies have highlighted stereotypes and biases present in LLM outputs, emphasizing the need to evaluate these models for their alignment with human narrative styles and potential gender biases. In this study, we assess the alignment of three prominent LLMs - Claude 3 Opus, Mistral AI Large, and Gemini 1.5 Flash - by analyzing their performance on benchmark text-generation tasks for scientific abstracts. We employ the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) framework to extract lexical, psychological, and social features from the generated texts. Our findings indicate that, while these models generally produce text closely resembling human authored content, variations in stylistic features suggest significant gender biases. This research highlights the importance of developing LLMs that maintain a diversity of writing styles to promote inclusivity in academic discourse.

English as foreign language_EFL_students' use of text generated from artificial intelligence_AI_natural language generation_NLG_tools may improve their writing quality. However, it remains unclear to what extent AI-generated text in these students' writing might lead to higher-quality writing. We explored 23 Hong Kong secondary school students' attempts to write stories comprising their own words and AI-generated text. Human experts scored the stories for dimensions of content, language and organization. We analyzed the basic organization and structure and syntactic complexity of the stories' AI-generated text and performed multiple linear regression and cluster analyses. The results show the number of human words and the number of AI-generated words contribute significantly to scores. Besides, students can be grouped into competent and less competent writers who use more AI-generated text or less AI-generated text compared to their peers. Comparisons of clusters reveal some benefit of AI-generated text in improving the quality of both high-scoring students' and low-scoring students' writing. The findings can inform pedagogical strategies to use AI-generated text for EFL students' writing and to address digital divides. This study contributes designs of NLG tools and writing activities to implement AI-generated text in schools.

Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual links manifest in diverse forms, ranging from direct verbatim quotations to subtle allusions and paraphrases disguised by morphological variation. Language models offer a promising path forward due to their capability of capturing semantic similarity beyond lexical overlap. However, the development of new methods for this task is held back by the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and easy-to-use datasets. We address this gap by introducing Loci Similes, a benchmark for Latin intertextuality detection comprising of a curated dataset of ~172k text segments containing 545 expert-verified parallels linking Late Antique authors to a corpus of classical authors. Using this data, we establish baselines for retrieval and classification of intertextualities with state-of-the-art LLMs.

Story visualization, the task of generating coherent images based on a narrative, has seen significant advancements with the emergence of text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models. However, maintaining semantic consistency, generating high-quality fine-grained interactions, and ensuring computational feasibility remain challenging, especially in long story visualization (i.e., up to 100 frames). In this work, we propose a training-free and computationally efficient framework, termed Story-Adapter, to enhance the generative capability of long stories. Specifically, we propose an iterative paradigm to refine each generated image, leveraging both the text prompt and all generated images from the previous iteration. Central to our framework is a training-free global reference cross-attention module, which aggregates all generated images from the previous iteration to preserve semantic consistency across the entire story, while minimizing computational costs with global embeddings. This iterative process progressively optimizes image generation by repeatedly incorporating text constraints, resulting in more precise and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Story-Adapter in improving both semantic consistency and generative capability for fine-grained interactions, particularly in long story scenarios. The project page and associated code can be accessed via https://jwmao1.github.io/storyadapter .

We show that large language models (LLMs) can be used to distinguish the writings of different authors. Specifically, an individual GPT-2 model, trained from scratch on the works of one author, will predict held-out text from that author more accurately than held-out text from other authors. We suggest that, in this way, a model trained on one author's works embodies the unique writing style of that author. We first demonstrate our approach on books written by eight different (known) authors. We also use this approach to confirm R. P. Thompson's authorship of the well-studied 15th book of the Oz series, originally attributed to F. L. Baum.

Large language models exhibit systematic deficiencies in creative writing, particularly in non-English contexts where training data is scarce and lacks process-level supervision. We present COIG-Writer, a novel Chinese creative writing dataset that captures both diverse outputs and their underlying thought processes through systematic reverse-engineering of high-quality texts. Unlike existing datasets that provide only input-output pairs, COIG-Writer comprises 1,665 meticulously curated triplets spanning 51 genres, each containing: (1) a reverse-engineered prompt, (2) detailed creative reasoning documenting decision-making processes, and (3) the final text. Through comprehensive experiments, we identify a two-component model of creative writing: narrative logic (provided by process supervision) and linguistic expression (maintained by general-purpose data). Our findings reveal three critical insights: (1) Process supervision is highly effective but requires stabilization with general data. A ratio of at least one creative sample to twelve general samples is needed to achieve optimal performance; below this threshold, the win rate progressively degrades (from 62.75% down to 35.78%)., (2) creative capabilities are culturally-bound with no cross-lingual transfer (89.26pp gap between Chinese and English performance), and (3) lexical diversity inversely correlates with creative quality (TTR paradox), suggesting high diversity signals compensatory behavior for logical deficiencies. These findings establish that creative excellence emerges from the interaction between logical scaffolding and linguistic grounding, analogous to how mathematical reasoning enhances but cannot replace linguistic competence in foundation models.

We introduce a new dataset for multi-class emotion analysis from long-form narratives in English. The Dataset for Emotions of Narrative Sequences (DENS) was collected from both classic literature available on Project Gutenberg and modern online narratives available on Wattpad, annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A number of statistics and baseline benchmarks are provided for the dataset. Of the tested techniques, we find that the fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT model achieves the best results, with an average micro-F1 score of 60.4%. Our results show that the dataset provides a novel opportunity in emotion analysis that requires moving beyond existing sentence-level techniques.

We consider the problem of automatically generating a narrative biomedical evidence summary from multiple trial reports. We evaluate modern neural models for abstractive summarization of relevant article abstracts from systematic reviews previously conducted by members of the Cochrane collaboration, using the authors conclusions section of the review abstract as our target. We enlist medical professionals to evaluate generated summaries, and we find that modern summarization systems yield consistently fluent and relevant synopses, but that they are not always factual. We propose new approaches that capitalize on domain-specific models to inform summarization, e.g., by explicitly demarcating snippets of inputs that convey key findings, and emphasizing the reports of large and high-quality trials. We find that these strategies modestly improve the factual accuracy of generated summaries. Finally, we propose a new method for automatically evaluating the factuality of generated narrative evidence syntheses using models that infer the directionality of reported findings.

Sequential vision-to-language or visual storytelling has recently been one of the areas of focus in computer vision and language modeling domains. Though existing models generate narratives that read subjectively well, there could be cases when these models miss out on generating stories that account and address all prospective human and animal characters in the image sequences. Considering this scenario, we propose a model that implicitly learns relationships between provided characters and thereby generates stories with respective characters in scope. We use the VIST dataset for this purpose and report numerous statistics on the dataset. Eventually, we describe the model, explain the experiment and discuss our current status and future work.

With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their potential has garnered significant attention in Chinese Classical Studies (CCS). While existing research has primarily focused on text and visual modalities, the audio corpus within this domain remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose the Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (MCGA). It encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering (SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR). Through the evaluation of ten MLLMs, our experimental results demonstrate that current models still face substantial challenges when processed on the MCGA test set. Furthermore, we introduce an evaluation metric for SEC and a metric to measure the consistency between the speech and text capabilities of MLLMs. We release MCGA and our code to the public to facilitate the development of MLLMs with more robust multidimensional audio capabilities in CCS. MCGA Corpus: https://github.com/yxduir/MCGA

Readability metrics and standards such as Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) exist to guide teachers and educators to properly assess the complexity of educational materials before administering them for classroom use. In this study, we select a diverse set of open and closed-source instruction-tuned language models and investigate their performances in writing story completions and simplifying narratives--tasks that teachers perform--using standard-guided prompts controlling text readability. Our extensive findings provide empirical proof of how globally recognized models like ChatGPT may be considered less effective and may require more refined prompts for these generative tasks compared to other open-sourced models such as BLOOMZ and FlanT5--which have shown promising results.