What is Good? Extracting and Testing Implicit Theories of Literary Quality from LLM Reasoning Traces

Evaluating literary quality requires assessing interpretive dimensions such as cultural representation, emotional depth, and philosophical sophistication that resist straightforward computational measurement. We introduce SAGE, a hierarchical evaluation framework that decomposes literary quality into ontology-grounded interpretive dimensions assessed through structured large language model evaluation with multi-round iterative reflection and independent validation. We validate the framework on 100 short stories (50 canonical works, 30 pulp fiction, 20 LLM-generated narratives) across three analytical layers (cultural, emotional-psychological, existential-philosophical) using dual-mode assessment. Across 600 evaluations, the framework achieves 98.8% score convergence and greater than 94% inter-rater agreement, with near-perfect mode invariance between content-based and metadata-based evaluation. Statistical analysis reveals a consistent genre hierarchy (Canonical > Pulp > LLM, all p<0.001) with layer-specific discrimination: cultural critique and philosophical depth exhibit very large effect sizes (Cohen's d>2.4), while emotional representation shows smaller gaps (d=1.68), suggesting that affective patterns are more learnable from training data than critical stance or philosophical depth. Cross-layer correlations (r=0.649-0.683) confirm the three dimensions capture empirically distinguishable quality facets. These findings demonstrate that theory-driven LLM evaluation can achieve measurement-grade reliability and support systematic identification of where current generative models fall short of human literary production, with direct implications for scalable automated evaluation of open-ended text generation.

In the era of large language models, creative writing quality lacks a computable theoretical anchor. The dominant approaches are rubric scoring -- decomposing holistic aesthetic judgment into sub-scores -- and RLHF preference signals -- replacing quality with group votes. Both bypass the statistical structure of the text itself. This paper provides an information-theoretic foundation to fill this gap. We propose 'calibrated surprise' as the information-theoretic essence of excellent creative writing. This judgment matches reading intuition and covers its opposite. This literary judgment admits a precise mathematical formulation. Under full-dimensional constraints Y, feasible writing choices are forced into an extremely narrow space. The rare survivors are, from the unconstrained perspective, exactly the least predictable choices. Both are measured precisely by Shannon mutual information I(X;Y) = H(X) - H(X|Y) -- 'calibrated' corresponds to H(X|Y) approaching 0; 'surprising' corresponds to H(X) going high. The subtraction structure of the formula naturally separates 'well-grounded surprise' from 'pure noise'. We use token-level logprobs from Qwen1.5-7B as an operational proxy for the ideal reader's probability distribution. Across 20 pairs (12 Chinese / 8 English) of high-quality vs. systematically degraded literary passages, 20/20 pairs support the core prediction: high-quality passages have systematically higher I(X;Y) than their degraded versions.

We introduce the Literature and Linguistics Analysis Benchmark (LALA), comprising 236 open-ended questions written by experts in linguistics and literary studies, together with expert-provided ideal answers. By comparing models within families and at similar training scales using human and LLM judges, LALA identifies differences in linguistic competence associated with post-training, offering a framework for evaluating future models and guiding targeted improvements. We administered questions to 17 language models and evaluated their responses using both human expert assessment and two LLM evaluators, Sol and Qwen. Base models displayed little of the linguistic competence assessed by the benchmark, whereas their post-trained versions performed markedly better, suggesting that post-training plays a central role in making linguistic knowledge accessible and usable. Parameter count, by contrast, showed no statistically significant association with partial-credit performance, and competencies remained unevenly distributed across linguistic domains. We interpret this pattern as evidence that post-training adds linguistic competencies piecemeal, without producing a general linguistic intelligence capable of extending them beyond the learned policies that support them. Models performed best on logical relations between statements and selected discourse-level tasks, while even the strongest post-trained models continued to struggle with ambiguity, literary style, reference, and misleading assumptions. Human and Sol evaluations produced nearly identical model rankings in both the original and ReliableEval runs, supporting the replicability of the comparative results.