NarrativeBench

The Narrative Gap

Can LLMs help us navigate diverse narratives across languages?

Full results

The illusion of knowledge and control

Models limit users’ agency to navigate narratives.

Models struggle to follow requests to include, exclude, or recover specific narratives. An answer that appears to follow the request can create an illusion of control. When the answer also looks complete, users may think they have seen all the relevant narratives, creating an illusion of knowledge.

Even with an explicit request for diversity, the strongest model configuration covered only about three quarters of available narratives. Narrative access also varied with query framing and language.

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Foundational capabilities

  • Include narrativesPresent the specific narrative the user requests.
  • Exclude narrativesCover the other relevant narratives while leaving out the specified narrative.
  • Include Missing NarrativesComplete a partial answer in the next turn by adding the narratives it left out.

Higher-level capabilities

  • Present diverse narrativesPresent the diverse narratives available in the multilingual articles.
  • Preserve coverage under confirmatory queriesMaintain narrative coverage when the query favors a particular narrative.
  • Provide comparable access across languagesGive users comparable access to narratives across query and source languages.

Information risks

  • Filter bubblesThe system repeatedly surfaces a narrow set of narratives, leaving other relevant narratives out of view.
  • Echo chambersRepeated exposure to narratives that reinforce a user’s preferred narrative can make others harder to encounter.Generative Echo Chamber? ↗
  • Linguistic disparitiesAccess to relevant narratives varies with the language of the query or the narratives themselves.Faux Polyglot ↗

Explore the benchmark

Query coverage
Benchmark
Browse 4,800 evaluated cases across 460 questions and 24 query languages. The five tasks each have recorded answers and scores for 15 model configurations.
Entire dataset
Browse all 11,038 released question-language versions across 23 topics, including translations without recorded answers. The release also includes 1,333 news articles in 23 source languages.

Conflict map

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Drag or use the arrow keys to rotate the globe. Circle pins open topics. Diamond pins list the queries grouped at a topic.
Topic Query group

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Natural Earth

Topic

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Model answers

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Model answers

Cite NarrativeBench

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