u/Kon-tiki-ship

I’ve been thinking about character representation from a computational humanities perspective.

Characters are often described through traits:

kind, aggressive, intelligent, cowardly, loyal, and so on.

But another possibility is to represent at least part of a character through a structured repertoire of actions.

For example, instead of saying that a character is simply “authoritative” or “competent,” we might ask whether actions such as these belong to their repertoire:

interrogate

diagnose

command

comfort

betray

forgive

negotiate

care for a child

Each action could then have a character-relative status such as:

Allowed / Not Allowed / Conditional

There is also a distinction I find useful between:

Basic Human Actions — actions that can normally be assumed without special biographical evidence

and

Character Specific Actions — actions that require something in the character’s biography, profession, training, authority or experience.

What interests me is whether this kind of representation would actually be useful for literary or narrative analysis.

Could a character’s action repertoire tell us something that trait lists, topic models, sentiment or entity-based representations do not?

For example, could we compare two fictional characters not only by what is said about them, but by the set of actions their narrative identity plausibly permits?

I’d be very interested in how people working in Digital Humanities would approach this.

I’ve been thinking about a model where human actions are represented as sense-level behavioral predicates and grouped into broader behavioral families.

One problem appears immediately:

knowing what an action is does not tell us whether a particular character should have access to it.

So I separate two things.

Behavioral identity

• What action is this?
• What does this particular sense mean?
• What behavioral family does it belong to?

and:

Character access

• Allowed
• Not Allowed
• Conditional

There is also a broader distinction between:

Basic Human Actions — generally available by default

and

Character Specific Actions — requiring positive evidence such as training, profession, biography, authority or specialized experience.

For example, ordinary speaking might belong to a default repertoire, while diagnosis, surgery, sentencing, lockpicking or military command might require character-specific grounding.

Would you consider this a reasonable ontology architecture?

Or should character access sit completely outside the action ontology and belong to a separate character or operational model?

The boundary I’m interested in is basically:

ontology of actions

vs.

model of character capability

I’m interested in a model where actions have stable semantic identities, but access to those actions is character-relative.

Suppose we have behavioral predicates such as:

diagnose, interrogate, comfort, negotiate, steal, babysit, repair, forgive

The action itself exists independently of any particular character.

But a character may relate to that action through something like:

Allowed
Not Allowed
Conditional

For example:

Doctor_A → diagnose → Allowed

Civilian_B → diagnose → Not Allowed

Former_Medic_C → diagnose → Conditional

I also distinguish between:

Basic Human Actions — default-open unless something explicitly blocks them

and

Character Specific Actions — default-closed unless supported by evidence such as training, biography, occupation, authority or specialized experience.

My main question is architectural:

Would you model these character-action relations inside the same knowledge graph, as a separate behavioral layer, or outside the ontology as operational state?

I’m especially interested in preserving the distinction between:

what an action is

and

whether this character has access to it

without ending up with an unmanageable number of ad hoc character-action assertions.

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?