Can LLMs Tell Stories Out of Order? A Corpus and Benchmark for Nonlinear Narrative Generation
Every story has two orders: the order in which its events happen and the order in which they are told. A story is nonlinear when the two differ. We introduce a benchmark of 83 published works that measures whether language models can tell nonlinear stories. For each work, we annotate one list of events in both orders, together with a story graph of causal dependencies, character knowledge, and the questions the telling raises and resolves. Given events in chronological order, all 19 models tell them, on average, more chronologically than the published works do; asked for a specific structure, they land within the human range about half the time. We then compare a model's stories of the sa...
| Authors | Syed Rifat Raiyan, Md. Tariquzzaman, Md Farhan Ishmam et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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