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The study combines manual and LLM-based annotation to build a dataset linking sentences from 150 novel summaries to their corresponding source chapters. It evaluates summary linearity and uniformity, then analyzes where and how these properties break. 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M. Hicke1 , Sil Hamilton2 , David Mimno2 , and Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan3   \n1 Computer Science Department, Cornell University  \n2 Information Science Department, Cornell University  \n3 School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University  \nAbstract  \nWorks 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-chapter mappings, we then measure summary linearity, the degree to which it maintains the source’s order of events, and uniformity, the degree to which a summary spreads attention equally across a source. By examining when and how summaries break linearity and uniformity, we identify differences in how literary works and summaries express plot, particularly with regard to the clarity and prominence with which narrative details are described.  \nKeywords: summarization, narrative understanding, plot extraction, cultural analytics, language models  \n1 Introduction  \nLiterary works combine artistic expression with plot and events. In contrast, a summary of a literary work separates out just the plot, compressing it to only the events the summarizer finds most impactful or necessary. Modeling summarization is therefore valuable both because it helps characterize the relative significance of events, but also because, through its modifications andomissions, it highlights the artistic expression of the author. Naively, we might hypothesize that summaries follow two principles. First, linearity: the summary should refer to events in the order they occur in the original work. Importantly, this concept is independent from linear narrative—a summary can faithfully report the sequence of a story told non-linearly. Second, uniformity: the summary should allocate the same amount of space to describing each part of the original work; that is, the summary’s description should be uniformly spread across the work.  \nAt the same time, there are many reasons why a summary might deviate from linearity and uniformity. Indeed, the Wikipedia guidelines for plot summaries explicitly state that “a plot summary is not a recap.” Breaks from both principles are permitted and sometimes encouraged. The guidelines specifically stress that “a plot summary... should not cover every scene or every moment of the story,” and that many plots “[include] a lengthy middle section... on their way to the climatic encounter” full of events which “often clutter a plot summary with excessive and repetitive detail.”On the subject of linearity, the guidelines say that “events can be reordered” if it “makes the plot easier to explain,” implicitly acknowledging that narratives are not always optimized for coherence  \nRebecca M. M. Hicke, Sil Hamilton, David Mimno, and Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan.“The Plot Thins: Uniformity and Linearity  \nin Literary Summaries.” In: Proceedings of Conference XXX, ed. by Editor1 Editor2 . Vol. 1. Anthology of Computers and the Humanities. 2025, 1–1. [https://doi.org/00000/00000](https://doi.org/00000/00000) .  \n© 2025 by the authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) .  \nFigure 1: Our summary sentence to chapter alignment task. Novels are treated twice: they are first split into chapters, and then summarized. Summaries and chapters are then aligned.  \nalone.1 Thus, the ways in which summaries break linearity and uniformity provide insight into the impact of artistic expression on the original works’ execution of the plot.  \nTo examine h","cbCaisHPvnlRCpJv","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaisHPvnlRCpJv","pdf",2179508,82,"English","# Introduction\n## Linearity vs. uniformity in plot summaries\n## Motivation for measuring deviations\n# Related Work\n## Stories, discourse, and plot\n# Method and dataset (sentence-to-chapter alignment)\n# Quantitative evaluation (linearity and uniformity)\n# Findings and analysis of breaks","[{\"question\":\"What dataset and alignment task does the study construct?\",\"answer\":\"It uses manual and LLM-based annotation to map sentences from 150 novel summaries to their respective source chapters, treating novels as chapter-split texts for alignment.\"},{\"question\":\"How are linearity and uniformity defined in literary summaries?\",\"answer\":\"Linearity measures how well a summary maintains the source’s order of events, while uniformity measures how evenly attention is spread across parts of the source.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the paper argue that summaries may deviate from linearity and uniformity?\",\"answer\":\"Deviations can occur because summaries may explicitly describe elements conveyed subtly in the source, emphasize more consequential events, or present information in ways that heighten emotion or drama for comprehension.\"}]","The Plot Thins - Uniformity and Linearity in Literary Summaries | PDF",1789471844,207]