Can LLMs Tell Stories Out of Order? A Corpus and Benchmark for Nonlinear Narrative Generation
arXiv:2610.21468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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…