@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-towards-novel,
    title = "Towards A ``Novel'' Benchmark: Evaluating Literary Fiction with Large Language Models",
    author = "Wang, Wenqing  and
      Gao, Mingqi  and
      Hu, Xinyu  and
      Wan, Xiaojun",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1114/",
    pages = "21648--21673",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Current exploration on creative generation focuses mainly on short stories, poetry, and scripts. With the expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) context windows, ``novel'' avenues emerge. This study aims to extend the boundaries of Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation by exploring LLMs' capabilities in more challenging long-form fiction. We propose a new multi-level evaluation framework that incorporates ten metrics across the Macro, Meso, and Micro levels. An annotated fiction dataset, sourced from human authors, LLMs, and human-AI collaborations in both English and Chinese is then constructed. Human evaluation reveals notable disparities between LLM-generated and human-authored fictions, particularly the ``high-starting, low-ending'' pattern in LLM outputs. We further probe ten high-performing LLMs through different prompt templates, achieving moderate correlations by strategically utilizing diverse LLMs tailored to different levels, as an initial step towards better automatic fiction evaluation. Finally, we offer a fine-grained analysis of LLMs capabilities through six issues, providing promising insights for future advancements."
}