Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives

Runcong Zhao, Qinglin Zhu, Hainiu Xu, Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Yulan He, Lin Gui


Abstract
Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives. Specifically, we designed hierarchical relationship categories and manually extracted and annotated role-oriented relationships from the perspectives of various characters, incorporating both public relationships known to most characters and secret ones known to only a few. Our experiments with advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2 reveal their limitations in inferencing complex relationships and handling longer narratives. The combination of the Conan dataset and our pipeline strategy is geared towards understanding the ability of LLMs to comprehend nuanced relational dynamics in narrative contexts.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.454
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7618–7638
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.454
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.454
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Runcong Zhao, Qinglin Zhu, Hainiu Xu, Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Yulan He, and Lin Gui. 2024. Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7618–7638, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives (Zhao et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.454.pdf