The 9th International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Text: Text2Story 2026

For eight years, the Text2Story Workshop series has fostered a vibrant research community dedicated to narrative understanding, advancing shared insights into the challenges of modelling narrative structure in text. While earlier approaches laid important foundations, recent progress in Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the field. Building on the increasing prominence of LLM-based contributions in recent editions, the ninth edition of Text2Story expands the focus toward agentic AI, where systems plan, reason, and interact over time using narratives as internal representations. Recent advances, including long-context architectures, instruction and preference-tuned models, retrieval-augmented generation, and discourse-aware prompting, have broadened the applicability of LLMs to complex narrative tasks. Nevertheless, reliably capturing fine-grained narrative structures remains challenging, particularly for event chains, temporal and causal relations, character development, and perspective consistency. These challenges are amplified in interactive and agentic settings, where narrative coherence, controllability, and reliability are critical. This edition of Text2Story explores both the opportunities and limitations of LLMs and agentic systems for narrative understanding, including the analysis of narratives generated by LLMs themselves with respect to consistency, hallucination, bias, and control. Through a diverse program of research papers, works in progress, demos, resources, and keynote talks, the workshop continues to advance narrative understanding in the era of foundation and agentic models.