Introduction to NLP

DR. GULSHAN S ALEEM

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR-FOIT
What is Semantic Analysis?
In the context of natural language processing and big
data analytics, it delves into understanding the
contextual meaning of individual words used,
sentences, and even entire documents. By breaking
down the linguistic constructs and relationships,
semantic analysis helps machines to grasp the
underlying significance, themes, and emotions carried
by the text.
Advantages of Semantic
Analysis
1.Enhanced Content Understanding: Semantic analysis enables machines to interpret
human language with a depth that surpasses mere keyword matching. It aids in
recognizing nuances, context, and relationships among words.
2.Improved Search Accuracy: Search engines leverage semantic analysis to produce
more relevant search results. Instead of merely fetching keyword-matched documents,
search engines can understand the user’s intent behind a query.
3.Tailored Marketing Insights: By understanding the sentiment and context of consumer
reviews, businesses can gain a clearer picture of their products’ strengths and weaknesses.
4.Advanced Data Analytics: Complex datasets, like research papers or lengthy
documents, can be summarized, categorized, and analyzed for themes and patterns using
semantic analysis.
5.Facilitating Language Translation: Semantic analysis aids in more accurate language
translations by understanding the context in which words and phrases are used, ensuring
translated content retains its original meaning.
Elements of Semantic
Analysis
Context Recognition Identifying and understanding the context is crucial. Words can have different
meanings based on their placement and surrounding content.
This involves pinpointing and classifying entities within the text, such as names of
Entity Recognition people, organizations, locations, and even specific values like dates and monetary
amounts.
Relationship Understanding how different words or entities relate to each other helps in grasping
Mapping the overall narrative or sentiment of the content.
While syntax refers to the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed
Syntax vs. sentences, semantics focuses on meaning. An effective semantic analysis recognizes
Semantics the interplay between these elements.
Words can have multiple meanings (polysemy) or sound the same but have different
Polysemy & meanings (homonyms). Effective semantic analysis can distinguish between these
Homonym Handling based on context.

Machine Learning Modern semantic analysis heavily relies on machine learning models and artificial
intelligence to iteratively learn and improve from vast amounts of data, enhancing
and AI Integration the accuracy of the analysis.
 Machine Learning Algorithm-Based
Automated Semantic Analysis
Deep The advent of deep learning, especially neural network architectures like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and
Learning and Transformers, has enabled machines to model complex linguistic patterns. For instance, models like BERT (Bidirectional
Neural Encoder Representations from Transformers) are designed to understand the context of words in a sentence, leading to a
Networks more profound understanding of text.
Before deep learning, word embeddings like Word2Vec and GloVe transformed the way machines perceived text. These
Word
embeddings translate words into vectors in a high-dimensional space where semantically similar words are positioned closely.
Embeddings
Such representation aids in capturing context and relationships among words.
Topic Algorithms like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are employed to classify and cluster textual data into various topics. By
Modeling analyzing the distribution of words, these algorithms can deduce the primary themes or topics a document addresses.
Sentiment ML models can be trained to understand the sentiment behind a piece of text. By analyzing datasets labeled with sentiments
Analysis (like positive, negative, neutral), these models learn to predict the emotions conveyed by new, unseen text.
One of the significant advancements in ML-based semantic analysis is the ability to leverage pre-trained models. Instead of
Transfer
training a model from scratch, one can use a model pre-trained on a vast dataset and fine-tune it for specific semantic analysis
Learning
tasks, saving time and computational resources.
Continuous
An advantage of ML algorithms is their ability to continuously learn. As more data becomes available, the models can be
Learning and
retrained or fine-tuned to adapt to new linguistic patterns, slang, or emerging terminologies.
Adaptation
Despite its prowess, ML-based semantic analysis isn’t without challenges. Ambiguities in language, sarcasm, idioms, and
Challenges cultural nuances can sometimes mislead algorithms. However, with the integration of more extensive and diverse training
datasets and the advancement of algorithms, these challenges are continually being addressed.
Aspects and Applications
Text Categorization: These models can classify news articles into genres (e.g.,
sports, politics, entertainment), blog posts into themes, or emails into categories like
spam or not-spam.
Sentiment Analysis: By training on labeled data, these models can categorize
sentiments in reviews as positive, negative, or neutral.
Intent Detection: Widely used in chatbots and virtual assistants, these models can
classify user queries into distinct intents like booking a ticket, asking a question, or
reporting an issue.
Language Detection: Given a piece of text, models can classify which language it’s
written in, facilitating further language-specific processing.
Techniques and Algorithms: Various machine learning algorithms, such as Support
Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, and deep learning architectures like
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are employed for semantic classification tasks.
Semantic Extraction Models
1.Named Entity Recognition (NER): This involves identifying and classifying named entities in the
text into categories like person names, organizations, locations, dates, and other predefined classes.
2.Relationship Extraction: Post NER, models can be trained to identify relationships between the
extracted entities. For instance, in the sentence “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii,” the
relationship between the entity “Barack Obama” and “Hawaii” is “born in.”
3.Coreference Resolution: This is about determining which words (“pronouns” and “nouns”) in a
text refer to the same entity. For example, in “Julia passed the ball to Jane. She shot a goal,” “She”
refers to “Jane.”
4.Keyphrase Extraction: Models can be designed to pull out key phrases or terms from a
document, giving a quick understanding of the document’s primary themes or topics.
5.Fact Extraction: This involves pulling out factual data from textual content, such as extracting
specifications from product descriptions or key events from news articles.
6.Techniques and Algorithms: For extraction tasks, Sequence tagging methods like Conditional
Random Fields (CRF) and deep learning models, especially Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and
Transformers, have shown excellent results.
Popular systems
NeuraSense Inc, a leading content streaming platform in 2023, has
integrated advanced semantic analysis algorithms to provide highly
personalized content recommendations to its users.
EcoGuard developed a tool that uses semantic analysis to sift through global
news articles, blogs, and reports to gauge the public sentiment towards
various environmental issues.
MedIntel, a global health tech company, launched a patient feedback system
in 2023 that uses a semantic analysis process to improve patient care.
Top Applications
1. Conversational Chatbots understand the intent and context behind user queries, ensuring more accurate
and relevant responses. For instance, if a user says, “I want to book a flight to Paris next Monday,” the chatbot
understands not just the keywords but the underlying intent to make a booking, the destination being Paris, and
the desired date.
2. Automated Ticketing Support When a customer submits a ticket saying, “My app crashes every time I try
to login,” semantic analysis helps the system understand the criticality of the issue (app crash) and its context
(during login). As a result, tickets can be automatically categorized, prioritized, and sometimes even provided to
customer service teams with potential solutions without human intervention.
3. Sentiment Analysis Companies use this to understand customer feedback. For instance, if a new
smartphone receives reviews like “The battery doesn’t last half a day!” or “Amazing camera quality!”, sentiment
analysis can categorize the former as negative feedback about the battery and the latter as positive feedback
about the camera.
4. Search Engine Results Search engines like Google heavily rely on semantic analysis to produce relevant
search results. If someone searches for “Apple not turning on,” the search engine recognizes that the user might
be referring to an Apple product (like an iPhone or MacBook) that won’t power on, rather than the fruit.
5. Language Translation Translating a sentence isn’t just about replacing words from one language with
another; it’s about preserving the original meaning and context. Semantic analysis ensures that translated
content retains the nuances, cultural references, and overall meaning of the original text.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Sentiment Analysis
contextual mining of text which identifies and extracts subjective information
in source material, and helping a business to understand the social sentiment
of their brand, product or service while monitoring online conversations.
Creative use of advanced artificial intelligence techniques can be an effective
tool for doing in-depth research.
Significance
It is important to classify incoming customer conversation about a brand
based on following lines:
1.Key aspects of a brand’s product and service that customers care about.
2.Users’ underlying intentions and reactions concerning those aspects.
These basic concepts when used in combination, become a very important
tool for analyzing millions of brand conversations with human level accuracy.
Intent Analysis
Intent analysis steps up
the game by analyzing
the user’s intention
behind a message and
identifying whether it
relates an opinion, news,
marketing, complaint,
suggestion, appreciation
or query.
Contextual Semantic
Search(CSS)
To derive actionable insights, it is important to understand what aspect of the
brand is a user discussing about. For example: Amazon would want to
segregate messages that related to: late deliveries, billing issues, promotion
related queries, product reviews etc.
On the other hand, Starbucks would want to classify messages based on
whether they relate to staff behavior, new coffee flavors, hygiene feedback,
online orders, store name and location etc. But how can one do that?
Intelligent smart search algorithm called Contextual Semantic Search
(a.k.a. CSS) work is that it takes thousands of messages and a concept
(like Price) as input and filters all the messages that closely match with the
given concept.
Contextual Semantic
Search(CSS)
Example
For a wide coverage of data sources, we took data from latest comments on
Uber’s official Facebook page, Tweets mentioning Uber and latest news
articles around Uber. Here’s a distribution of data points across all the
channels:
1.Facebook: 34,173 Comments
2.Twitter: 21,603 Tweets
3.News: 4,245 Articles
Intent Analysis (Facebook Posts)
Intent Analysis (Facebook Posts)
Sentiment (after Intent Analysis)
Twitter
Sentiment Analysis (Twitter)
News
Conclusion
The age of getting meaningful insights from social media data has now
arrived with the advance in technology.
Companies have been leveraging the power of data lately, but to get the
deepest of the information, you have to leverage the power of AI, Deep
learning and intelligent classifiers like Contextual Semantic Search
and Sentiment Analysis.
 Comparison
Aspect Semantic Analysis Sentiment Analysis
Focuses on understanding the meaning and context of
Definition Focuses on identifying the emotional tone or attitude in text.
text.
To interpret and represent the meaning of words, To classify the polarity (positive, negative, neutral) or intensity of
Goal
phrases, and sentences. emotions expressed.
- What does the text mean? - How does the author feel?
Key Questions
- How are concepts related? - Is the tone positive, negative, or neutral?
- Lexical semantics (word relationships) - Polarity detection
Techniques
- Parsing and syntactic analysis - Emotion classification
Used
- Word sense disambiguation - Aspect-based sentiment analysis
- Chatbots and virtual assistants - Product reviews and feedback analysis
Applications - Knowledge graph creation - Social media monitoring
- Information retrieval and summarization - Customer sentiment analysis
- Identifying synonyms or word meanings in context.
Example - Classifying "This phone is amazing!" as positive sentiment or "This
- Understanding the relationship between "bank" as a
Output service is terrible." as negative sentiment.
financial institution vs. riverbank.
Level of - Focuses on meaning and relationships between
- Focuses on emotional evaluation and subjective opinions.
Analysis entities in a linguistic structure.
Underlying
Understanding what is being said. Understanding how it is being said.
Principle