Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books
Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decou...
| Authors | Argyrios Papoudakis, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 April 2026 |
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