Narrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts

TL;DR

Narrative Consolidation reframes multi-perspective narratives as a task focused on chronological coherence and completeness rather than compression. The authors propose the Temporal Alignment Event Graph (TAEG), a temporal backbone that aligns event versions across sources using a canonical timeline, and demonstrate its efficacy on Gospel harmonization, achieving perfect temporal ordering and dramatic semantic gains. A Gospel Consolidation Language Resource accompanies the method, providing data, temporal alignments, and a reference consolidation for benchmarking. The work establishes a foundation for future neural and abstractive approaches that build on the explicit temporal structure to deliver unified, coherent narratives across domains beyond religious texts.

Abstract

Processing overlapping narrative documents, such as legal testimonies or historical accounts, often aims not for compression but for a unified, coherent, and chronologically sound text. Standard Multi-Document Summarization (MDS), with its focus on conciseness, fails to preserve narrative flow. This paper formally defines this challenge as a new NLP task: Narrative Consolidation, where the central objectives are chronological integrity, completeness, and the fusion of complementary details. To demonstrate the critical role of temporal structure in this task, we introduce Temporal Alignment Event Graph (TAEG), a graph structure that explicitly models chronology and event alignment. By applying a standard centrality algorithm to TAEG, our method functions as a version selection mechanism, choosing the most central representation of each event in its correct temporal position. In a study on the four Biblical Gospels, this structure-focused approach guarantees perfect temporal ordering (Kendall's Tau of 1.000) by design and dramatically improves content metrics (e.g., +357.2% in ROUGE-L F1). The success of this baseline method validates the formulation of Narrative Consolidation as a relevant task and establishes that an explicit temporal backbone is a fundamental component for its resolution.