Automated Motif Indexing on the Arabian Nights

Thematic indexing -- the practice of assigning structured conceptual labels to sections of text -- is essential to scholarly access in large-scale literary and historical editions, yet it remains a largely manual, labour-intensive process. This paper explores the application of machine learning to automatic thematic indexing, using two substantial sub-corpora of the Complete Works of Voltaire as a test case: the Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations and the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie. The task is framed as a multi-label classification problem, in which a model must assign the set of index entries that a professional indexer would apply to a given page of text. We compare a range of approaches -- from encoder-based models with classification heads to generative large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) -- spanning model sizes from approximately 3 to 120 billion parameters. Our best-performing model, from the Mistral family in a 4-bit quantised configuration, achieves F1 scores of up to 0.67; we argue that these figures represent lower bounds, given the inherent subjectivity of professional indexing and the frequency with which model predictions prove semantically valid despite diverging from the print index. We further evaluate cross-corpus generalisation and conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of model behaviour on literary and rhetorical features of the source texts that prove particularly resistant to automated treatment. Our findings have implications for the broader challenge of providing structured thematic access to large-scale literary and historical corpora.

Deep narrative understanding requires distinguishing what happens from how it is presented, moving beyond the chronological fabula to decode the sjuzet, the discursive organization through which themes are staged. We study this through the recurrence of literary motifs (blood in Macbeth, for instance), where symbolic significance emerges not from local cues, but through repetition-with-variation across the whole work. We operationalize this setting as Computational Motif Discovery, a transductive task that predicts missing line-motif links using the full narrative structure of a play. We propose Critic's Eye, which models the work as a heterogeneous Narrative Topology Graph and performs discriminative inference over global structural evidence. Critic's Eye achieves 84.8% Hit@5 on our benchmark, nearly quadrupling state-of-the-art proprietary foundation models (Gemini-3-pro-preview, ~22.6%). Our analysis reveals that despite massive scaling, sequence-based models hit a "semantic ceiling", struggling to resolve dispersed dependencies. These findings suggest that explicit structural priors are a far more effective inductive bias than parameter scaling for decoding the complex architecture of long-form literature.

AraGenre is a shared task on hierarchical, definition-guided Arabic genre classification, motivated by the limited availability of annotated data in Arabic and other low-resource languages. Systems assign each Arabic text segment both a broad communicative genre and a fine-grained specific genre. The released training and development sets contain limited, primarily synthetic and controlled examples, whereas the hidden final benchmark contains noisier naturally occurring text spanning Modern Standard Arabic, Classical Arabic, and multiple dialects. Participants received natural-language definitions for 74 previously unseen specific genres, creating a zero-shot label generalisation setting in which systems had to infer class semantics rather than memorise fixed label-feature associations. The task attracted 46 registrations and 373 submissions, with 17 teams completing the final evaluation. Thakaa ranked first with a Hierarchical Macro F1 of 0.7352, followed by HoangPhong (HP) with 0.7169 and NAMAA with 0.7013. The results show strong broad-genre recognition but a substantial gap in fine-grained classification under linguistic and domain variation.