The Plot Thins: Uniformity and Linearity in Literary Summaries

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.17218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Works of literature are complicated; they balance plot, suspense, surprise, and artistic expression. Summaries of literature prioritize plot, and therefore may deviate from their sources. Using a combination of manual and LLM-based annotation, we construct a dataset mapping sentences from 150 novel summaries to their respective source chapters. We find the task unexpectedly difficult for both human and model annotators. Using the sentence-to-chapte