Semantic processing is about understanding the meaning of a given piece of text. But what do we mean by understanding the meaning of text? Let’s see how the human brain processes meaning.
When you hear the sentence:
“Croatia fought hard before succumbing to France’s deadly attack; lost the finals 2 goals to 4”,
you understand that this text is about football and the FIFA world cup final, even though the words’ football’ and ‘ FIFA’ are not mentioned in the sentence. Also, you understand that the word’ succumb’ and ‘goal’ are used differently than in the sentences’ He succumbed to head injuries and died on the spot and ‘My life goal’.
Your brain can process sentences meaningfully because it can relate the text to other word and concepts it already knows, such as football , FIFA etc. it can process meaning in the context of the text and can disambiguate between multiple possible senses of word such as ‘goal’ and ‘succumb’ . Also , your brain has an understanding of topics being talked about in a text , such as ‘football’ and ‘FIFA World Cup’ ,even though these exact words are not present in the text.
Semantic text processing focusses on teaching machines to process text in similar ways.
Specifically, some areas of semantics you will study in this course are word sense disambiguation( identifying the intended meaning of