# WebNovelBench: Placing LLM Novelists on the Web Novel Distribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [Justice or Prejudice? Quantifying Biases in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02736/) (2024)
- [Optimization-based Prompt Injection Attack to LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17710/) (2024)
- [PRD: Peer Rank and Discussion Improve Large Language Model based Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02762/) (2023)
- [Wider and Deeper LLM Networks are Fairer LLM Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01862/) (2023)
- [MixEval: Deriving Wisdom of the Crowd from LLM Benchmark Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06565/) (2024)
- [OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08920/) (2021)
- [Beyond Traditional Benchmarks: Analyzing Behaviors of Open LLMs on Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10186/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LLMs Should Incorporate Explicit Mechanisms for Human Empathy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10557/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Framework Comparison of Outline Stages in Long-Form Generation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26177/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.