Citation

Janis Pagel, Nils Reiter. Spinfo Cologne at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Explainable Creation of Narrativity Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pp. 2376-2383, San Diego, CA, USA, July 2026. Doi: 10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.299.

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Abstract

We describe our submission to SemEval-2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning.The task requires (i) selecting, for a given anchor story summary, which of two candidate summaries is narratively closer (Track A) and (ii) producing a narrative representation of a story as a vector embedding (Track B).Our approach emphasizes interpretability by explicitly eliciting three narrativity aspects with a prompted large language model.We then construct a fixed-size narrative embedding by concatenating aspect-wise representations, comparing a static-embedding baseline (GloVe) to contextualized sentence-transformer embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2).On the development set, the sentence-transformer variant outperforms the static baseline and achieves 61.5% accuracy on Track A, while the GloVe variant performs near chance.Our official submission reaches 60.25% accuracy on the Track A test set and 57.75% accuracy on Track B.Additional ablations show that the aspect pipeline slightly outperforms raw-text embeddings, but that aspect contributions are uneven.Qualitative analysis suggests that failures often stem from inconsistent aspect generation and from overemphasizing theme overlap over event-level similarity.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{pagel2026a,
   author    = {Janis Pagel and Nils Reiter},
   booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)}},
   doi       = {10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.299},
   location  = {San Diego, CA, USA},
   month     = {7},
   pages     = {2376--2383},
   title     = {{Spinfo Cologne at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Explainable Creation of Narrativity Embeddings}},
   year      = {2026},
}

RIS

TY - CPAPER
TI - Spinfo Cologne at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Explainable Creation of Narrativity Embeddings
AU - Janis Pagel
AU - Nils Reiter
PY - 2026
J2 - Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
DO - 10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.299
CY - San Diego, CA, USA
SP - 2376
EP - 2383
ER -