Exploring the Depths of Meaning: Semantic Similarity in Natural Language Processing by Everton Gomede, PhD

Enter natural language processing, a branch of computer science that enables computers to understand spoken words and text more like humans do. While, as humans, it is pretty simple for us to understand the meaning of textual information, it is not so in the case of machines. Thus, machines tend to represent the text in specific formats in order to interpret its meaning. This formal structure that is used to understand the meaning of a text is called meaning representation. One can train machines to make near-accurate predictions by providing text samples as input to semantically-enhanced ML algorithms. Machine learning-based semantic analysis involves sub-tasks such as relationship extraction and word sense disambiguation.

Parsing implies pulling out a certain set of words from a text, based on predefined rules. For example, we want to find out the names of all locations mentioned in a newspaper. Semantic analysis would be an overkill for such an application and syntactic analysis does the job just fine. While semantic analysis is more modern and sophisticated, it is also expensive to implement. A strong grasp of semantic analysis helps firms improve their communication with customers without needing to talk much. That leads us to the need for something better and more sophisticated, i.e., Semantic Analysis.

In 1950, the legendary Alan Turing created a test—later dubbed the Turing Test—that was designed to test a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, specifically using conversational language. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intermediate tasks (e.g., part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing) have not been needed anymore. The main difference between them is that in polysemy, the meanings of the words are related but in homonymy, the meanings of the words are not related.

Benefits of Natural Language Processing

While NLP and other forms of AI aren’t perfect, natural language processing can bring objectivity to data analysis, providing more accurate and consistent results. Another remarkable thing about human language is that it is all about symbols. According to Chris Manning, a machine learning professor at Stanford, it is a discrete, symbolic, categorical signaling system. The following is a list of some of the most commonly researched tasks in natural language processing. Some of these tasks have direct real-world applications, while others more commonly serve as subtasks that are used to aid in solving larger tasks.

With lexical semantics, the study of word meanings, semantic analysis provides a deeper understanding of unstructured text. Semantic Analysis is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that attempts to understand the meaning of Natural Language. Understanding Natural Language might seem a straightforward process to us as humans. However, due to the vast complexity and subjectivity involved in human language, interpreting it is quite a complicated task for machines. Semantic Analysis of Natural Language captures the meaning of the given text while taking into account context, logical structuring of sentences and grammar roles. Understanding human language is considered a difficult task due to its complexity.

Clearly, then, the primary pattern is to use NLP to extract structured data from text-based documents. These data are then linked via Semantic technologies to pre-existing data located in databases and elsewhere, thus bridging the gap between documents and formal, structured data. Similarly, some tools specialize in simply extracting locations and people referenced in documents and do not even attempt to understand overall meaning.

And if companies need to find the best price for specific materials, natural language processing can review various websites and locate the optimal price. With sentiment analysis we want to determine the attitude (i.e. the sentiment) of a speaker or writer with respect to a document, interaction or event. Therefore it is a natural language processing problem where text needs to be understood in order to predict the underlying intent. The sentiment is mostly categorized into positive, negative and neutral categories.

It is a fundamental step for NLP and AI, as it helps machines recognize and interpret the words and phrases that humans use. Lexical analysis involves tasks such as tokenization, lemmatization, stemming, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. Semantic analysis analyzes the grammatical format of sentences, including the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses, to determine relationships between independent terms in a specific context. It is also a key component of several machine learning tools available today, such as search engines, chatbots, and text analysis software. Semantic analysis refers to a process of understanding natural language (text) by extracting insightful information such as context, emotions, and sentiments from unstructured data.

In essence, it equates to teaching computers to interpret what humans say so they can understand the full meaning and respond appropriately. The first part of semantic analysis, studying the meaning of individual words is called lexical semantics. It includes words, sub-words, affixes (sub-units), compound words and phrases also. In other words, we can say that lexical semantics is the relationship between lexical items, meaning of sentences and syntax of sentence. Semantics gives a deeper understanding of the text in sources such as a blog post, comments in a forum, documents, group chat applications, chatbots, etc.

It makes the customer feel “listened to” without actually having to hire someone to listen. Many other applications of NLP technology exist today, but these five applications are the ones most commonly seen in modern enterprise applications. This lesson will introduce NLP technologies and illustrate how they can be used to add tremendous value in Semantic Web applications. A “stem” is the part of a word that remains after the removal of all affixes. For example, the stem for the word “touched” is “touch.” “Touch” is also the stem of “touching,” and so on.

Moreover, analyzing customer reviews, feedback, or satisfaction surveys helps understand the overall customer experience by factoring in language tone, emotions, and even sentiments. The specific technique used is called Entity Extraction, which basically identifies proper nouns (e.g., people, places, companies) and other specific information for the purposes of searching. Natural language processing (NLP) and Semantic Web technologies are both Semantic Technologies, but with different and complementary roles in data management.

Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson, Nuance’s Dragon… there is certainly have no shortage of hype at the moment surrounding NLP. Truly, after decades of research, these technologies are finally hitting their stride, being utilized in both consumer and enterprise commercial applications. Now, imagine all the English words in the vocabulary with all their different fixations at the end of them. To store them all would require a huge database containing many words that actually have the same meaning. Popular algorithms for stemming include the Porter stemming algorithm from 1979, which still works well. These two sentences mean the exact same thing and the use of the word is identical.

Then it starts to generate words in another language that entail the same information. With the use of sentiment analysis, for example, we may want to predict a customer’s opinion and attitude about a product based on a review they wrote. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to reviews, Chat PG surveys, documents and much more. Relationship extraction takes the named entities of NER and tries to identify the semantic relationships between them. This could mean, for example, finding out who is married to whom, that a person works for a specific company and so on.

Need of Meaning Representations

Semantic
analysis of natural language expressions and generation of their logical
forms is the subject of this chapter. By knowing the structure of sentences, we can start trying to understand the meaning of sentences. We start off with the meaning of words being vectors but we can also do this with whole phrases and sentences, where the meaning is also represented as vectors. And if we want to know the relationship of or between sentences, we train a neural network to make those decisions for us. In semantic analysis, word sense disambiguation refers to an automated process of determining the sense or meaning of the word in a given context.

Your phone basically understands what you have said, but often can’t do anything with it because it doesn’t understand the meaning behind it. Also, some of the technologies out there only make you think they understand the meaning of a text. The semantic analysis process begins by studying and analyzing the dictionary definitions and meanings of individual words also referred to as lexical semantics. Following this, the relationship between words in a sentence is examined to provide clear understanding of the context. Picture yourself asking a question to the chatbot on your favorite streaming platform. Since computers don’t think as humans do, how is the chatbot able to use semantics to convey the meaning of your words?

So how can NLP technologies realistically be used in conjunction with the Semantic Web? NLP-powered apps can check for spelling errors, highlight unnecessary or misapplied grammar and even suggest simpler ways to organize sentences. Natural language processing can also translate text into other languages, aiding students in learning a new language.

Semiotics refers to what the word means and also the meaning it evokes or communicates. For example, ‘tea’ refers to a hot beverage, while it also evokes refreshment, alertness, and many other associations. On the other hand, collocations are two or more words that often go together. Semantic analysis helps in processing customer queries and understanding their meaning, thereby allowing an organization to understand the customer’s inclination.

IBM’s Watson provides a conversation service that uses semantic analysis (natural language understanding) and deep learning to derive meaning from unstructured data. It analyzes text to reveal the type of sentiment, emotion, data category, and the relation between words based on the semantic role of the keywords used in the text. According to IBM, semantic analysis has saved 50% of the company’s time on the information gathering process. Lexical analysis is the process of identifying and categorizing lexical items in a text or speech.

Using Syntactic analysis, a computer would be able to understand the parts of speech of the different words in the sentence. Based on the understanding, it can then try and estimate the meaning of the sentence. In the case of the above example (however ridiculous it might be in real life), there is no conflict about the interpretation. With its ability to process large amounts of data, NLP can inform manufacturers on how to improve production workflows, when to perform machine maintenance and what issues need to be fixed in products.

In cases such as this, a fixed relational model of data storage is clearly inadequate. Question Answering – This is the new hot topic in NLP, as evidenced by Siri and Watson. However, long before these tools, we had Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), and later Wolfram Alpha, which specialized in question answering.

Semantic analysis is defined as a process of understanding natural language (text) by extracting insightful information such as context, emotions, and sentiments from unstructured data. This article explains the fundamentals of semantic analysis, how it works, examples, and the top five semantic analysis applications in 2022. One such approach uses the so-called “logical form,” which is a representation
of meaning based on the familiar predicate and lambda calculi. In
this section, we present this approach to meaning and explore the degree
to which it can represent ideas expressed in natural language sentences. We use Prolog as a practical medium for demonstrating the viability of
this approach.

In finance, NLP can be paired with machine learning to generate financial reports based on invoices, statements and other documents. Financial analysts can also employ natural language processing to predict stock market trends by analyzing news articles, social media posts and other online sources for market sentiments. In the form of chatbots, natural language processing can take some of the weight off customer service teams, promptly responding to online queries and redirecting customers when needed. NLP can also analyze customer surveys and feedback, allowing teams to gather timely intel on how customers feel about a brand and steps they can take to improve customer sentiment. Syntactic analysis, also referred to as syntax analysis or parsing, is the process of analyzing natural language with the rules of a formal grammar. Grammatical rules are applied to categories and groups of words, not individual words.

The semantic analysis method begins with a language-independent step of analyzing the set of words in the text to understand their meanings. This step is termed ‘lexical semantics‘ and refers to fetching the dictionary definition for the words in the text. Each element is designated a grammatical role, and the whole structure is processed to cut down on any confusion caused by ambiguous words having multiple meanings. The basic units of lexical semantics are words and phrases, also known as lexical items.

Affixing a numeral to the items in these predicates designates that
in the semantic representation of an idea, we are talking about a particular
instance, or interpretation, of an action or object. The third example shows how the semantic information transmitted in
a case grammar can be represented as a predicate. In fact, this is one area where Semantic Web technologies have a huge advantage over relational technologies. By their very nature, NLP technologies can extract a wide variety of information, and Semantic Web technologies are by their very nature created to store such varied and changing data.

Syntactic analysis (syntax) and semantic analysis (semantic) are the two primary techniques that lead to the understanding of natural language. Lexical resources are databases or collections of lexical items and their meanings and relations. They are useful for NLP and AI, as they provide information and knowledge about language and the world. Some examples of lexical resources are dictionaries, thesauri, ontologies, and corpora.

Have you ever misunderstood a sentence you’ve read and had to read it all over again? Have you ever heard a jargon term or slang phrase and had no idea what it meant? Understanding what people are saying can be difficult even for us homo sapiens. Clearly, making sense of human language is a legitimately hard problem for computers.

With structure I mean that we have the verb (“robbed”), which is marked with a “V” above it and a “VP” above that, which is linked with a “S” to the subject (“the thief”), which has a “NP” above it. This is like a template for a subject-verb relationship and there are many others for other types of relationships. Below is a parse tree for the sentence “The thief robbed the apartment.” Included is a description of the three different information types conveyed by the sentence. Although rule-based systems for manipulating symbols were still in use in 2020, they have become mostly obsolete with the advance of LLMs in 2023.

According to a 2020 survey by Seagate technology, around 68% of the unstructured and text data that flows into the top 1,500 global companies (surveyed) goes unattended and unused. With growing NLP and NLU solutions across industries, deriving insights from such unleveraged data will only add value to the enterprises. Semantic analysis plays semantics nlp a vital role in the automated handling of customer grievances, managing customer support tickets, and dealing with chats and direct messages via chatbots or call bots, among other tasks. For example, semantic analysis can generate a repository of the most common customer inquiries and then decide how to address or respond to them.

Some of the challenges are ambiguity, variability, creativity, and evolution of language. Some of the opportunities are semantic representation, semantic similarity, semantic inference, and semantic evaluation. Speech recognition, for example, has gotten very good and works almost flawlessly, but we still lack this kind of proficiency in natural language understanding.

The word “flies” has at least two senses as a noun
(insects, fly balls) and at least two more as a verb (goes fast, goes through
the air). The semantic analysis does throw better results, but it also requires substantially more training and computation. In this field, professionals need to keep abreast of what’s happening across their entire industry. Most information about the industry is published in press releases, news stories, and the like, and very little of this information is encoded in a highly structured way. However, most information about one’s own business will be represented in structured databases internal to each specific organization. Therefore, NLP begins by look at grammatical structure, but guesses must be made wherever the grammar is ambiguous or incorrect.

• The tool analyzes every user interaction with the ecommerce site to determine their intentions and thereby offers results inclined to those intentions.
• These assistants are a form of conversational AI that can carry on more sophisticated discussions.
• These difficulties mean that general-purpose NLP is very, very difficult, so the situations in which NLP technologies seem to be most effective tend to be domain-specific.
• As discussed in previous articles, NLP cannot decipher ambiguous words, which are words that can have more than one meaning in different contexts.
• But before getting into the concept and approaches related to meaning representation, we need to understand the building blocks of semantic system.

While NLP-powered chatbots and callbots are most common in customer service contexts, companies have also relied on natural language processing to power virtual assistants. These assistants are a form of conversational AI that can carry on more sophisticated discussions. And if NLP is unable to resolve an issue, it can connect a customer with the appropriate personnel.

For example, ‘Raspberry Pi’ can refer to a fruit, a single-board computer, or even a company (UK-based foundation). Hence, it is critical to identify which meaning suits the word depending on its usage. To know the meaning of Orange in a sentence, we need to know the words around it. Semantic Analysis and Syntactic Analysis are two essential elements of NLP.

Word Sense Disambiguation involves interpreting the meaning of a word based upon the context of its occurrence in a text. With sentiment analysis, companies can gauge user intent, evaluate their experience, and accordingly plan on how to address their problems and execute advertising or marketing campaigns. In short, sentiment analysis can streamline and boost successful business strategies for enterprises. Customers benefit from such a support system as they receive timely and accurate responses on the issues raised by them. Moreover, the system can prioritize or flag urgent requests and route them to the respective customer service teams for immediate action with semantic analysis.

Semantics – Meaning Representation in NLP

Recruiters and HR personnel can use natural language processing to sift through hundreds of resumes, picking out promising candidates based on keywords, education, skills and other criteria. In addition, NLP’s data analysis capabilities are ideal for reviewing employee surveys and quickly determining how employees feel about the workplace. Gathering market intelligence becomes much easier with natural language processing, which can analyze online reviews, social media posts and web forums. Compiling this data can help marketing teams understand what consumers care about and how they perceive a business’ brand.

It gives computers and systems the ability to understand, interpret, and derive meanings from sentences, paragraphs, reports, registers, files, or any document of a similar kind. Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of computer science and artificial intelligence concerned with the interaction between computers and humans in natural language. The ultimate goal of NLP is to help computers understand language as well as we do. It is the driving force behind things like virtual assistants, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, automatic text summarization, machine translation and much more.

Semantic Analysis helps machines interpret the meaning of texts and extract useful information, thus providing invaluable data while reducing manual efforts. Uber uses semantic analysis to analyze users’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction levels via social listening. Semantic analysis techniques and tools allow automated text classification or tickets, freeing the concerned staff from mundane and repetitive tasks. In the larger context, this enables agents to focus on the prioritization of urgent matters and deal with them on an immediate basis. It also shortens response time considerably, which keeps customers satisfied and happy.

Maps are essential to Uber’s cab services of destination search, routing, and prediction of the estimated arrival time (ETA). Along with services, it also improves the overall experience of the riders and drivers. Syntax analysis and Semantic analysis can give the same output for simple use cases (eg. parsing). However, for more complex use cases (e.g. Q&A Bot), Semantic analysis gives much better results. A successful semantic strategy portrays a customer-centric image of a firm.

Search engines use semantic analysis to understand better and analyze user intent as they search for information on the web. Moreover, with the ability to capture the context of user searches, the engine can provide accurate and relevant results. Natural Language Processing or NLP is a branch of computer science that deals with analyzing spoken and written language. Advances in NLP have led to breakthrough https://chat.openai.com/ innovations such as chatbots, automated content creators, summarizers, and sentiment analyzers. The field’s ultimate goal is to ensure that computers understand and process language as well as humans. The combination of NLP and Semantic Web technology enables the pharmaceutical competitive intelligence officer to ask such complicated questions and actually get reasonable answers in return.

Ties with cognitive linguistics are part of the historical heritage of NLP, but they have been less frequently addressed since the statistical turn during the 1990s. The more examples of sentences and phrases NLP-driven programs see, the better they become at understanding the meaning behind the words. Below, we examine some of the various techniques NLP uses to better understand the semantics behind the words an AI is processing—and what’s actually being said. Consider the task of text summarization which is used to create digestible chunks of information from large quantities of text.

Lexical semantics plays a vital role in NLP and AI, as it enables machines to understand and generate natural language. By applying the principles of lexical semantics, machines can perform tasks such as machine translation, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, natural language generation, and dialogue systems. Lexical semantics is the study of how words and phrases relate to each other and to the world. It is essential for natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), as it helps machines understand the meaning and context of human language. In this article, you will learn how to apply the principles of lexical semantics to NLP and AI, and how they can improve your applications and research.

So the question is, why settle for an educated guess when you can rely on actual knowledge? Several companies are using the sentiment analysis functionality to understand the voice of their customers, extract sentiments and emotions from text, and, in turn, derive actionable data from them. It helps capture the tone of customers when they post reviews and opinions on social media posts or company websites.