@inproceedings{fundal-bizzoni-2026-directional,
title = "Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human{--}{LLM} Co-Writing",
author = "Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl and
Bizzoni, Yuri",
editor = {Hamilton, Sil and
{\"O}hman, Emily and
Hicke, Rebecca M. M. and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Bax, Axel and
Matthews, Jacob A. and
H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.18/",
pages = "190--201",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
abstract = "We investigate narrative agency in hu-man{--}LLM creative co-writing, asking whodrives story development in turn-based collabo-ration. Using a new corpus of human{--}LLM co-written stories, we apply sentiment and seman-tic modeling to quantify affective alignmentand semantic novelty in turn-taking, and direc-tional measures to assess which agent shapesnarrative progression. Our results show asym-metric influence: human turns introduce greatersemantic novelty and are more likely to shapesubsequent developments, whereas LLM con-tributions predominantly elaborate on human-introduced elements. At the sentiment level,alignment is also asymmetric, but more bidirec-tional: LLMs exhibit stronger turn-level emo-tional adaptation than humans, but both agentstrack each other{'}s emotional valence and LLMsshow an independent tendency to more pos-itive emotional baselines. These findings in-dicate a complementary division of labor inhuman{--}LLM co-writing, where humans drivenarrative innovation and direction, while LLMsact as adaptive amplifiers that sustain coherenceand elaborate emerging narratives."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human–LLM Co-Writing
%A Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl
%A Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Hamilton, Sil
%Y Öhman, Emily
%Y Hicke, Rebecca M. M.
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Bax, Axel
%Y Matthews, Jacob A.
%Y Hämäläinen, Mika
%S Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-427-9
%F fundal-bizzoni-2026-directional
%X We investigate narrative agency in hu-man–LLM creative co-writing, asking whodrives story development in turn-based collabo-ration. Using a new corpus of human–LLM co-written stories, we apply sentiment and seman-tic modeling to quantify affective alignmentand semantic novelty in turn-taking, and direc-tional measures to assess which agent shapesnarrative progression. Our results show asym-metric influence: human turns introduce greatersemantic novelty and are more likely to shapesubsequent developments, whereas LLM con-tributions predominantly elaborate on human-introduced elements. At the sentiment level,alignment is also asymmetric, but more bidirec-tional: LLMs exhibit stronger turn-level emo-tional adaptation than humans, but both agentstrack each other’s emotional valence and LLMsshow an independent tendency to more pos-itive emotional baselines. These findings in-dicate a complementary division of labor inhuman–LLM co-writing, where humans drivenarrative innovation and direction, while LLMsact as adaptive amplifiers that sustain coherenceand elaborate emerging narratives.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.18/
%P 190-201
Markdown (Informal)
[Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human–LLM Co-Writing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.18/) (Fundal & Bizzoni, NLP4DH 2026)
ACL