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Do Language Models Agree with Human Perceptions of Suspense in Stories?

NLP
Computational Linguistics
Narrative
An investigation into whether language models can distinguish and estimate suspense in text sequences compared to human judgments.
Authors

Glenn Matlin

Devin Zhang

RB Loza

DM Popescu

J Isbell

C Chakraborty

Mark Riedl

Published

August 13, 2025

Publication Details

arXiv: 2508.15794

Abstract

This work investigates whether language models can distinguish whether a text is intended to induce suspense in people, whether LMs can accurately estimate the relative amount of suspense within a text sequence as compared to human judgments, and whether LMs can properly capture the human perception for the rise and fall of suspense across multiple text segments.

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