Agenda-based Narrative Extraction: Steering Pathfinding Algorithms with Large Language Models

Existing narrative extraction methods face a trade-off between coherence, interactivity, and multi-storyline support. Narrative Maps supports rich interaction and generates multiple storylines as a byproduct of its coverage constraints, though this comes at the cost of individual path coherence. Narrative Trails achieves high coherence through maximum capacity path optimization but provides no mechanism for user guidance or multiple perspectives. We introduce agenda-based narrative extraction, a method that bridges this gap by integrating large language models into the Narrative Trails pathfinding process to steer storyline construction toward user-specified perspectives. Our approach uses an LLM at each step to rank candidate documents based on their alignment with a given agenda while maintaining narrative coherence. Running the algorithm with different agendas yields different storylines through the same corpus. We evaluated our approach on a news article corpus using LLM judges with Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.1, measuring both coherence and agenda alignment across 64 endpoint pairs and 6 agendas. LLM-driven steering achieves 9.9% higher alignment than keyword matching on semantic agendas (p=0.017), with 13.3% improvement on \textit{Regime Crackdown} specifically (p=0.037), while keyword matching remains competitive on agendas with literal keyword overlap. The coherence cost is minimal: LLM steering reduces coherence by only 2.2% compared to the agenda-agnostic baseline. Counter-agendas that contradict the source material score uniformly low (2.2-2.5) across all methods, confirming that steering cannot fabricate unsupported narratives.

Semantic Interaction for Narrative Map Sensemaking: An Insight-based Evaluation

Semantic interaction (SI) enables analysts to incorporate their cognitive processes into AI models through direct manipulation of visualizations. While SI frameworks for narrative extraction have been proposed, empirical evaluations of their effectiveness remain limited. This paper presents a user study that evaluates SI for narrative map sensemaking, involving 33 participants under three conditions: a timeline baseline, a basic narrative map, and an interactive narrative map with SI capabilities. The results show that the map-based prototypes yielded more insights than the timeline baseline, with the SI-enabled condition reaching statistical significance and the basic map condition trending in the same direction. The SI-enabled condition showed the highest mean performance; differences between the map conditions were not statistically significant but showed large effect sizes (d > 0.8), suggesting that the study was underpowered to detect them. Qualitative analysis identified two distinct SI approaches-corrective and additive-that enable analysts to impose quality judgments and organizational structure on extracted narratives. We also find that SI users achieved comparable exploration breadth with less parameter manipulation, suggesting that SI serves as an alternative pathway for model refinement. This work provides empirical evidence that map-based representations outperform timelines for narrative sensemaking, along with qualitative insights into how analysts use SI for narrative refinement.