mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding

arXiv 2109.05438 ↗First posted 12 Sep 2021cs.CLcited by 48

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Abstract (arXiv)

When reading a literary piece, readers often make inferences about various characters' roles, personalities, relationships, intents, actions, etc. While humans can readily draw upon their past experiences to build such a character-centric view of the narrative, understanding characters in narratives can be a challenging task for machines. To encourage research in this field of character-centric narrative understanding, we present LiSCU -- a new dataset of literary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that appear in them. We also introduce two new tasks on LiSCU: Character Identification and Character Description Generation. Our experiments with several pre-trained language models adapted for these tasks demonstrate that there is a need for better models of narrative comprehension.

Key facts. Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 21 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2021.

Builds on

21 of 54 references.

References · 21

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  5. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,893
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  7. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  8. 2019ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representationscited by 2,790
  9. 2019HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processingcited by 2,218
  10. 2020On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 900
  11. 2019SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spanscited by 834
  12. 2020Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformerscited by 471
9 more
  1. 2017Why We Need New Evaluation Metrics for NLGcited by 233
  2. 2019Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluationcited by 189
  3. 2019BERT for Coreference Resolution: Baselines and Analysiscited by 125
  4. 2018No Metrics Are Perfect: Adversarial Reward Learning for Visual Storytellingcited by 46
  5. 2020Modeling Protagonist Emotions for Emotion-Aware Storytellingcited by 42
  6. 2020Exploring Content Selection in Summarization of Novel Chapterscited by 29
  7. 2019Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characterscited by 23
  8. 2015Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summariescited by 16
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 13; 2023: 5; 2024: 17; 2025: 7; 2026: 6.

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  1. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 212
  2. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 82
  3. 2022Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA -- An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehensioncited by 80
  4. 2024Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Workscited by 38
  5. 2024Character is Destiny: Can Role-Playing Language Agents Make Persona-Driven Decisions?cited by 34
  6. 2022Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 22
  7. 2022Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mindcited by 19
  8. 2023PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narrativescited by 19
  9. 2022TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessingcited by 17
  10. 2022Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generationcited by 15
  11. 2023Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understandingcited by 15
  12. 2022MBTI Personality Prediction for Fictional Characters Using Movie Scriptscited by 14
36 more
  1. 2024Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narrativescited by 14
  2. 2024Beyond Math: Stories as a Testbed for Memorization-Constrained Reasoning in LLMscited by 12
  3. 2022Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generationcited by 11
  4. 2022A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessmentscited by 10
  5. 2024Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Frameworkcited by 10
  6. 2024CHIRON: Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narrativescited by 9
  7. 2022Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understandingcited by 8
  8. 2022CoRRPUS: Code-based Structured Prompting for Neurosymbolic Story Understandingcited by 7
  9. 2023Detecting and Grounding Important Characters in Visual Storiescited by 6
  10. 2025CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewardscited by 6
  11. 2022NarraSum: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive Narrative Summarizationcited by 5
  12. 2025Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 5
  13. 2025Codifying Character Logic in Role-Playingcited by 5
  14. 2024Distinguishing Fictional Voices: a Study of Authorship Verification Models for Quotation Attributioncited by 4
  15. 2025Classifying Unreliable Narrators with Large Language Modelscited by 4
  16. 2022Grounded Keys-to-Text Generation: Towards Factual Open-Ended Generationcited by 3
  17. 2023Prosody Analysis of Audiobookscited by 3
  18. 2024Previously on the Stories: Recap Snippet Identification for Story Readingcited by 3
  19. 2024Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddingscited by 3
  20. 2024BookWorm: A Dataset for Character Description and Analysiscited by 3
  21. 2025BOOKCOREF: Coreference Resolution at Book Scalecited by 3
  22. 2024Using Natural Language Inference to Improve Persona Extraction from Dialogue in a New Domaincited by 2
  23. 2024Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Playcited by 2
  24. 2024CHATTER: A Character Attribution Dataset for Narrative Understandingcited by 2
  25. 2024Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characterscited by 1
  26. 2024Computational Analysis of Character Development in Holocaust Testimoniescited by 1
  27. 2025ORIBA: Exploring LLM-Driven Role-Play Chatbot as a Creativity Support Tool for Original Character Artistscited by 1
  28. 2026S-VoCAL: A Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Inferring Speaking Voice Character Attributes in Literaturecited by 1
  29. 2026A Structured Clustering Approach for Inducing Media Narrativescited by 1
  30. 2026GraphLit: Learning Text-Enriched Dynamic Character Network Representations for Literary Studycited by 1
  31. 2022A Benchmark for Understanding and Generating Dialogue between Characters in Storiescited by 0
  32. 2023Causal schema induction for knowledge discoverycited by 0
  33. 2025EvolvTrip: Enhancing Literary Character Understanding with Temporal Theory-of-Mind Graphscited by 0
  34. 2026Reward-Decomposed Reinforcement Learning for Immersive Video Role-Playingcited by 0
  35. 2026CASPER in the Machine: Insights into Character Variety in LLM-Generated Storiescited by 0
  36. 2026Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligencecited by 0