We present an interesting application of narrative understanding in the clinical assessment of aphasia, where story retelling tasks are used to evaluate a patient’s communication abilities. This clinical setting provides a framework to help operationalize narrative discourse analysis and an application-focused evaluation method for narrative understanding systems. In particular, we highlight the use of main concepts (MCs)—a list of statements that capture a story’s gist—for aphasic discourse analysis. We then propose automatically generating MCs from novel stories, which experts can edit manually, thus enabling wider adaptation of current assessment tools. We further develop a prompt ensemble method using large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate MCs for a novel story. We evaluate our method on an existing narrative summarization dataset to establish its intrinsic validity. We further apply it to a set of stories that have been annotated with MCs through extensive analysis of retells from non-aphasic and aphasic participants (Kurland et al., 2021, 2025). Our results show that our proposed method can generate most of the gold-standard MCs for stories from this dataset. Finally, we release this dataset of stories with annotated MCs to spur more research in this area.

Existing Latin treebanks draw from Latin’s long written tradition, spanning 17 centuries and a variety of cultures. Recent efforts have begun to harmonize these treebanks’ annotations to better train and evaluate morphological taggers. However, the heterogeneity of these treebanks must be carefully considered to build effective and reliable data. In this work, we review existing Latin treebanks to identify the texts they draw from, identify their overlap, and document their coverage across time and genre. We additionally design automated conversions of their morphological feature annotations into the conventions of standard Latin grammar. From this, we build new time-period data splits that draw from the existing treebanks which we use to perform a broad cross-time analysis for POS and morphological feature tagging. We find that BERT-based taggers outperform existing taggers while also being more robust to cross-domain shifts.