Do BERT Embeddings Encode Narrative Dimensions? A Token-Level Probing Analysis of Time, Space, Causality, and Character in Fiction

arXiv:2604.10786v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Narrative understanding requires multidimensional semantic structures. This study investigates whether BERT embeddings encode dimensions of fictional narrative semantics -- time, space, causality, and character. Using an LLM to accelerate annotation, we construct a token-level dataset labeled with these four narrative categories plus "others." A linear probe on BERT embeddings (94% accuracy) significantly outperforms a control probe on variance-m