Evaluating LLMs for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts: A Case Study of LLaMa3
Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in a variety of literary tasks, often using complex memorized details of narration and fictional characters. In this work, we evaluate the ability of Llama-3 at attributing utterances of direct-speech to their speaker in novels. The LLM shows impressive results on a corpus of 28 novels, surpassing published results with ChatGPT and encoder-based baselines by a large margin. We then validate these results by assessing the impact of book memorization and annotation contamination.We found that these types of memorization do not explain the large performance gain, making Llama-3 the new state-of-the-art for quotation attribution in English literature. We release publicly our code and data.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{michel-etal-2025-evaluating,
title = "Evaluating {LLM}s for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts: A Case Study of {LL}a{M}a3",
author = "Michel, Gaspard and
Epure, Elena V. and
Hennequin, Romain and
Cerisara, Christophe",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-short.62/",
pages = "742--755",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-190-2"
}