We present the shared task on narrative similarity and narrative representation learning — NSNRL (pronounced "nass-na-rel").The task operationalizes narrative similarity as a binary classification problem: determining which of two stories is more similar to an anchor story.We introduce a novel definition of narrative similarity, compatible with both narrative theory and intuitive judgment.Based on the similarity judgments collected under this concept, we also evaluate narrative embedding representations.We collected at least two annotations each for more than 1,000 story summary triples, with each annotation being backed by at least two annotators in agreement.This paper describes the sampling and annotation process for the dataset; further, we give an overview of the submitted systems and the techniques they employ.We received a total of 71 final submissions from 46 teams across our two tracks.In our triple-based classification setup, LLM ensembles make up many of the top-scoring systems, while in the embedding setup, systems with pre- and post-processing on pretrained embedding models perform about on par with custom fine-tuned solutions.Our analysis identifies potential headroom for improvement of automated systems in both tracks.The task website includes visualizations of embeddings alongside instance-level classification results for all teams.

We present the novel dataset GermAnProse, an annotated corpus consisting of four German short prose texts accompanied by an extensive set of narrative-focused annotations.As part of this dataset, we contribute an annotation scheme for mentions, speech, and character agency: Characters in Action (ChiA).GermAnProse also contains information on narrative phenomena: narrativity, semantic verb classes, and plot keyness.Moreover, we include reader reception data in the form of timing information for audiobook performances, indicating pauses between sentences and the time taken to read a specific sentence in a performance.We release the dataset, which contains more than 18,000 manually created standoff annotations in JSON format, enabling researchers to utilize this resource for further exploratory applications.