Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative
  Understanding
Lixing Zhu Runcong Zhao Lin Gui Yulan He
Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes,
providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires.
Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically
coherent text, their ability to comprehend the author's thoughts remains
uncertain. This limitation hinders the practical applications of narrative
understanding. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of narrative
understanding tasks, thoroughly examining their key features, definitions,
taxonomy, associated datasets, training objectives, evaluation metrics, and
limitations. Furthermore, we explore the potential of expanding the
capabilities of modularized LLMs to address novel narrative understanding
tasks. By framing narrative understanding as the retrieval of the author's
imaginative cues that outline the narrative structure, our study introduces a
fresh perspective on enhancing narrative comprehension.