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Narrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts

arxiv.org/abs/2512.18041

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Updated 2 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FSZ9YMC2MD09W0W6PE6B

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 2 h ago
arXiv
2512.18041
T1 · 2 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 2 h ago

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Processing overlapping narrative documents, such as legal testimonies or historical accounts, often aims not for compression but for a unified, coherent, and chronologically sound text. Standard Multi-Document Summarization (MDS), with its focus on conciseness, fails to preserve narrative flow. This paper formally defines this challenge as a new NLP task, Narrative Consolidation, focusing on chronological integrity, completeness, and the fusion of complementary details. We establish the resources needed to study it: a formal task definition, an evaluation paradigm, the Gospel Consolidation Language Resource -- a benchmark built from the four Biblical Gospels with 169 canonical events, cross-document alignments, and a reference consolidation -- and a suite of reference systems, ranging from timeline-agnostic heuristics to the Temporal Alignment Event Graph (TAEG). Benchmarking yields three findings. First, the explicit temporal backbone is the dominant factor: every system granted the canonical timeline raises ROUGE-L F1 from 0.206 to at least 0.81. Second, on a fusion-style reference, a simple length heuristic is remarkably strong (0.947 ROUGE-L F1), outperforming graph-based selection (0.846). Third, ablations show the discriminative signal resides in temporal edges, while intra-cluster lexical similarity is uninformative. These results establish Narrative Consolidation as a distinct task and pose an open challenge: to surpass that heuristic with a principled selection mechanism and true fusion of complementary details.

Authors 4

Roger A. Finger, Eduardo G. Cortes, Sandro J. Rigo, Gabriel de O. Ramos

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

arXiv id
2512.18041

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Categories
cs.CL, cs.LG

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

DOI
10.5753/jbcs.2026.7717

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

10

Source tiers

T110

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None