LitVISTA: A Benchmark for Narrative Orchestration in Literary Text

TL;DR

LitVISTA introduces a benchmark and framework for evaluating how well language models understand and generate complex literary narratives, focusing on narrative function and structure.

Contribution

The paper presents LitVISTA, a novel annotated benchmark grounded in literary texts, and VISTA Space, a high-dimensional framework for narrative orchestration analysis.

Findings

Current models struggle to jointly capture narrative function and structure.

Models fail to form an integrated global view of literary narratives.

Failures are mainly due to anchor identification and localization errors.

Abstract

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 suggests a structural misalignment between model- and human-generated narratives. We therefore position narrative analysis as a diagnostic proxy for generation and propose VISTA Space, a high-dimensional framework for narrative orchestration that unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. We further introduce LitVISTA, a structurally annotated benchmark grounded in literary texts, which operationalizes VISTA Space for systematic evaluation of models' narrative orchestration capabilities. Under an oracle setting with gold event anchors, we evaluate frontier LLMs including GPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. Results reveal systematic deficiencies, as current models struggle to jointly capture narrative function and structure and fail to form an integrated global view of literary narrative orchestration. End-to-end analysis further shows that failures are dominated by anchor identification and localization errors. Even advanced thinking modes yield mixed and often limited gains for literary narrative understanding.