IAI Colloquium Series: "Narrative Intelligence in Large Language Models" by Dr. Inderjeet Mani

Dr. INDERJEET MANI

Monday, July 20th, 2026
1:00 – 2:00pm
SPRK 229 (Formerly Global)

Abstract

Story understanding and storytelling have been longstanding problems in AI. Using NarrativeML, a structured representation of narrative elements and relations, I examine how LLMs recover narrative structure, infer causality and motivation, and generate stories from formal representations. The results reveal substantial narrative capabilities, including the modeling of perspective, temporal order, character goals, and plot structure. However, there are persistent limitations in reasoning across long distances in text, as well as a lack of embodied understanding and cultural knowledge. This assessment sheds light on the nature of narrative intelligence, and also carries broader sociocultural implications for generative AI.

Biography

Dr. Prof. (Retd.) Inderjeet Mani has published a hundred-odd scientific papers and seven scholarly books on areas of natural language processing and AI, his latest scholarly book being Narrative and Generative AI. He is also the award-winning author of two novels, nearly fifty short literary pieces, the editor of a WW2 non-fiction memoir, and translator of a famous 12th Century long poem. His affiliations have included Georgetown University (Associate Professor), Yahoo (Senior Director), Cambridge University (Visiting Fellow), MITRE (Senior Principal Scientist), Brandeis University (Visiting Scholar), the Indian Institute of Science (Consulting Scientist) and MIT (Research Affiliate).

Hosted by IAI NLP Group

Host: Dr. Shubhra Kanti Karmaker (“Santu”)

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