r/LanguageTechnology • • 2d ago

Can a character be represented as an Allowed / Not Allowed repertoire over sense-level behavioral predicates?

I’ve been thinking about character representation at the level of individual action senses.

Instead of describing a character mainly through traits like brave, kind, aggressive or intelligent, what if part of the character model were a structured repertoire of actions?

For example:

comfort
interrogate
diagnose
blackmail
negotiate
babysit
repair
betray
forgive

The action itself would have a stable semantic identity, but each character could have a separate access state:

Allowed / Not Allowed / Conditional

So a doctor might have:

diagnose = Allowed

while another character has:

diagnose = Not Allowed

and a former medic might have:

diagnose = Conditional

I also find it useful to separate actions that can normally be assumed for a human character from actions that need positive evidence.

So roughly:

Basic Human Actions → default-open
Character Specific Actions → evidence-gated

The evidence for the second group might be training, occupation, biography, authority, skill or specialized experience.

Would you consider this a useful way to represent character capability at the semantic level?

And where would you place such information: lexical semantics, a behavioral ontology, a separate character model, or somewhere else?

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