ToMStories: Interpreting Theory-of-Mind in Synthetic Narratives
Understanding people often requires inferring what they feel or want from how they behave rather than from what they state outright. We ask whether language models can make these inferences, and how they do so. We introduce Theory-of-Mind Stories (ToMStories), an evaluation dataset of ~6,000 short synthetically generated narrative vignettes, each paired with a multiple-choice or open-ended question about a character's emotion, fear, motivation, or emotional wound. These psychological states are conveyed implicitly (showing), explicitly (telling), or with conflict between dialogue and description. Evaluating thirteen open-weight models (1B-72B parameters), we find that the largest models m...
| Authors | Melanie Subbiah, Chia-En Jacklyn Tsai, Kathleen McKeown |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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