The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework that uses bridging inference and knowledge graphs to discover and analyze latent personas in large language models through discourse coherence.

Contribution

It presents a structured approach to uncover LLM personas by modeling implicit relations as knowledge graphs, surpassing surface-level analysis methods.

Findings

Bridging-inference graphs improve semantic coherence in persona detection.

Structural discourse organization encodes consistent persona traits.

The approach outperforms frequency and style-based baselines across various LLMs.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference -- implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git