Semantilised

Semantilised is an adjective and past participle used to describe something that has been given a semantic interpretation or representation. In linguistics and cognitive science, to semantilise a linguistic item or corpus means to map its form to a content-bearing representation, such as a predicate-argument structure or a formal logic expression, thereby making its meaning explicit rather than relying on surface syntax alone.

Etymology: The term appears to be a back-formation from semantics, formed with the British suffix -ised to reflect the process of turning signs into semantics. It is not widely standardized, and its precise usage can vary across authors and communities.

Usage and scope: The concept appears in discussions of semantic parsing, semantic annotation, meaning representation, and ontology alignment, especially within natural language processing and theoretical linguistics. It contrasts with analyses that focus solely on syntactic structure without constructing explicit semantic content.

Examples: In NLP, a sentence may be semantilised by converting it into a formal representation such as a predicate-argument structure or a lambda-calculus expression. For instance, the sentence “The bank approved the loan” can be semantilised by mapping “bank” to a financial institution and “approved” to an event with agent and patient roles, producing a structured meaning representation.

Limitations: The term is relatively niche and not universally standardized. Its interpretation can differ by context, and some writers may prefer alternative terms such as semantic representation or semanticisation.

See also: semantics; natural language processing; semantic parsing; knowledge representation.