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.

本文对叙事理解任务进行了综合调查，详细研究了其关键特征、定义、分类、相关数据集、训练目标、评估指标和局限性。此外，我们探讨了将模块化大型语言模型的能力扩展到新的叙事理解任务的潜力，并通过将叙事理解视为提取作者想象线索的方式，引入了增强叙事理解的新方法。