What is "semantic analysis"

n. 1 (context linguistics English) The process of relating syntax structures, from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings, removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that such a project is possible. 2 (context computing English) The phase in which a compiler adds semantic information to the parse tree and builds the symbol table.

Semantic analysis, also context sensitive analysis, is a process in compiler construction, usually after parsing, to gather necessary semantic information from the source code. It usually includes type checking, or makes sure a variable is declared before use which is impossible to describe in Extended Backus–Naur Form and thus not easily detected during parsing.

Semantic analysis may refer to:

• Semantic analysis (compilers)
• Semantic analysis (machine learning)
• Semantic analysis (knowledge representation)
• Semantic analysis (linguistics)
• Semantic Analysis (book) a 1960 book by philosopher Paul Ziff.
• Semantic analytics

In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings. It also involves removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that such a project is possible. The elements of idiom and figurative speech, being cultural, are often also converted into relatively invariant meanings in semantic analysis. Semantics, although related to pragmatics, is distinct in that the former deals with word or sentence choice in any given context, while pragmatics considers the unique or particular meaning derived from context or tone. To reiterate in different terms, semantics is about universally coded meaning, and pragmatics the meaning encoded in words that is then interpreted by an audience.

Semantic analysis can begin with the relationship between individual words. This requires an understanding of lexical hierarchy, including hyponymy and hypernymy, meronomy, polysemy, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. It also relates to concepts like connotation (semiotics) and collocation, which is the particular combination of words that can be or frequently are surrounding a single word. This can include idioms, metaphor, and simile, like, "white as a ghost."

With the availability of enough material to analyze, semantic analysis can be used to catalog and trace the style of writing of specific authors.

Semantic analysis is a method for eliciting and representing knowledge about organisations.

Initially the problem must be defined by domain experts and passed to the project analyst(s). The next step is the generation of candidate affordances. This step will generate a list of semantic units that may be included in the schema. The candidate grouping follows where some of the semantic units that will appear in the schema are placed in simple groups. Finally the groups will be integrated together into an ontology chart.

Semantic analysis always starts from the problem definition which if not clear, require the analyst to employ relevant literature, interviews with the stakeholders and other techniques towards collecting supplementary information. All assumptions made must be genuine and not limiting the system.

In machine learning, semantic analysis of a corpus is the task of building structures that approximate concepts from a large set of documents. It generally does not involve prior semantic understanding of the documents.

Latent semantic analysis (sometimes latent semantic indexing), is a class of techniques where documents are represented as vectors in term space. A prominent example is PLSI.

Latent Dirichlet allocation involves attributing document terms to topics.

n-grams and hidden Markov models work by representing the term stream as a markov chain where each term is derived from the few terms before it.

Semantic Analysis is a book written by American philosopher Paul Ziff. It was first published in 1960 but has been reprinted at least four times since.

Semantic analysis (computational) is a composite of the " semantic analysis" and the "computational" components.

"Semantic analysis" refers to a formal analysis of meaning, and "computational" refer to approaches that in principle support effective implementation.