Previously on the Stories: Recap Snippet Identification for Story Reading
This addresses a useful but understudied application in NLP for book readers, though it appears incremental as it introduces a new benchmark rather than a major methodological breakthrough.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying recap snippets in story reading to help readers recall important plot elements, proposing the first benchmark for this task with a hand-crafted dataset and showing it is challenging for PLMs, LLMs, and proposed methods.
Similar to the "previously-on" scenes in TV shows, recaps can help book reading by recalling the readers' memory about the important elements in previous texts to better understand the ongoing plot. Despite its usefulness, this application has not been well studied in the NLP community. We propose the first benchmark on this useful task called Recap Snippet Identification with a hand-crafted evaluation dataset. Our experiments show that the proposed task is challenging to PLMs, LLMs, and proposed methods as the task requires a deep understanding of the plot correlation between snippets.