Narrative World Model: Narratology-Grounded Writer Memory for Long-Form Fiction

Researchers introduced the Narrative World Model (NWM), a writer-memory system that uses a narratology-grounded typed temporal-state graph and query-conditioned hybrid retrieval to answer multi-hop questions about long-form fiction. NWM significantly outperformed existing systems like Graphiti/Zep on narratological QA benchmarks, demonstrating that its representational structure, not extraction quality, drives the advantage.

arXiv:2607.05577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-form fiction writers need memory that answers multi-hop questions about evolving story state: who knows a secret and when they learned it, whether an event preceded the narration that revealed it, whether a setup paid off, and how a relationship shifted. General-purpose retrieval and agent-memory systems represent entities and facts but not the narratological structure these questions turn on, so they surface the wrong evidence or none at all. We introduce the Narrative World Model NWM , a writer-memory system that pairs a narratology-grounded typed temporal-state graph with query-conditioned hybrid retrieval. To measure memory rather than the answerer, we read every system through a single held-constant Opus 4.8 reader over only that system's chapter-safe evidence, on a reproducible public corpus and a validated multi-hop benchmark, and we compare against the strongest existing temporal-knowledge-graph agent-memory framework, Graphiti/Zep Rasmussen et al., 2025 . NWM substantially and significantly outperforms this baseline on multi-hop narratological QA across both corpora, and far exceeds GraphRAG and flat retrieval. The advantage is representational rather than an artifact of extraction: it survives rebuilding the baseline with NWM's own extractor, and traces to its narratology-grounded structure and query-conditioned retrieval, not to graph size or extractor quality.