Poster: The Haunting Problem — Recognizing Semantic Absence in Trauma-Aware AI

This poster summarizes the theoretical foundation of The Haunting Problem, introducing semantic absence as a new class of verification failure in trauma-aware AI. It visualizes how emotional silence, suppression, and dissociation—often overlooked by conventional affective models—can be represented as formal states within a verifiable system. The work outlines how absence itself becomes a detectable and ethically meaningful signal, bridging multimodal affective data (language, audio, and microexpressions) with symbolic verification through Z3 satisfiability logic. This visualization accompanies the full preprint: The Haunting Problem: Recognizing Semantic Absence in Trauma-Aware AI (George, 2025), available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17578153