@inproceedings{papoudakis-etal-2026-think,
title = "Think Before you Write: {QA}-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books",
author = "Papoudakis, Argyrios and
Lapata, Mirella and
Keller, Frank",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1259/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1259",
pages = "25144--25164",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decouples reasoning from generation. Our approach, which can be applied on top of long-context LLMs or chunk-based methods, consists of a reasoning model that produces a structured QA reasoning trace and a generation model that conditions on this trace to produce the final character description. Experiments on two datasets (BookWorm and CroSS) show that QA-guided reasoning improves faithfulness, informativeness, and grounding over strong long-context baselines."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="papoudakis-etal-2026-think">
<titleInfo>
<title>Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Argyrios</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Papoudakis</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mirella</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lapata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Frank</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Keller</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-395-1</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decouples reasoning from generation. Our approach, which can be applied on top of long-context LLMs or chunk-based methods, consists of a reasoning model that produces a structured QA reasoning trace and a generation model that conditions on this trace to produce the final character description. Experiments on two datasets (BookWorm and CroSS) show that QA-guided reasoning improves faithfulness, informativeness, and grounding over strong long-context baselines.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">papoudakis-etal-2026-think</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1259</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1259/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>25144</start>
<end>25164</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books
%A Papoudakis, Argyrios
%A Lapata, Mirella
%A Keller, Frank
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F papoudakis-etal-2026-think
%X Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decouples reasoning from generation. Our approach, which can be applied on top of long-context LLMs or chunk-based methods, consists of a reasoning model that produces a structured QA reasoning trace and a generation model that conditions on this trace to produce the final character description. Experiments on two datasets (BookWorm and CroSS) show that QA-guided reasoning improves faithfulness, informativeness, and grounding over strong long-context baselines.
%R 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1259
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1259/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1259
%P 25144-25164
Markdown (Informal)
[Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1259/) (Papoudakis et al., Findings 2026)
ACL