EvolvTrip: Enhancing Literary Character Understanding with Temporal Theory-of-Mind Graphs

Abstract: A compelling portrayal of characters is essential to the success of narrative writing. For readers, appreciating a character's traits requires the ability to infer their evolving beliefs, desires, and intentions over the course of a complex storyline, a cognitive skill known as Theory-of-Mind (ToM). Performing ToM reasoning in prolonged narratives requires readers to integrate historical context with current narrative information, a task at which humans excel but LLMs often struggle. To systematically evaluate LLMs' ToM reasoning capability in long narratives, we construct LitCharToM, a benchmark of character-centric questions across four ToM dimensions from classic literature. Further, we introduce EvolvTrip, a perspective-aware temporal knowledge graph that tracks psychological development throughout narratives. Our experiments demonstrate that EvolvTrip consistently enhances performance of LLMs across varying scales, even in challenging extended-context scenarios. EvolvTrip proves to be particularly valuable for smaller models, partially bridging the performance gap with larger LLMs and showing great compatibility with lengthy narratives. Our findings highlight the importance of explicit representation of temporal character mental states in narrative comprehension and offer a foundation for more sophisticated character understanding. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/EvolvTrip.