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

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: arxiv.org/abs/2512.18041
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: arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18041
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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Attributed facts

10

Source tiers

T110

Freshest observation

2 h ago

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None

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Authors: Roger A. Finger, Eduardo G. Cortes, Sandro J. Rigo

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Claim history · Primary category

1 claims · 1 propertiesShow all properties

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Claim history for Primary category
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.CL	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperNarrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts
New paper: Narrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts
arxiv
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	41 min ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.