semantic

Semantic refers to meaning in language and communication, and in related disciplines. It is distinct from syntax, which concerns structure and rules of sentence formation. The term appears in linguistics, philosophy of language, computer science, cognitive science, and information science.

In linguistics, semantics studies how words, phrases, and sentences convey meaning, including lexical semantics (word meanings), compositional semantics (how meanings combine), and sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy. Pragmatics addresses how context influences interpretation, while semantics focuses on meaning itself independent of context whenever possible.

Formal semantics uses tools of logic and mathematics to model truth conditions of sentences, often via model theory or possible-world semantics. It seeks to specify how the meaning of complex expressions follows from the meanings of their parts. Influential approaches include truth-conditional semantics and Montague grammar.

In computational fields, semantic processing aims to extract and manipulate meaning from text. Distributional semantics uses statistical patterns to infer semantic similarity from large corpora. Semantic parsing and semantic role labeling map sentences to structured representations. Embedding models encode word or sentence meaning in vector spaces.

The semantic web attempts to encode machine-interpretable meaning on the internet. Standards such as RDF and OWL define ontologies and relationships, enabling data to be linked and queried with SPARQL. This enhances information retrieval, data integration, and automated reasoning.

Challenges include ambiguity, polysemy, and context dependence; cross-linguistic variation in meaning; and the gap between formal models and natural language use. Advances continue across theory and applications, influencing search, translation, question answering, and artificial intelligence.