Introduction to semenatics and semantics studies

Inside the enterprise, missing or ineffectively managed information can be extremely costly. Not
only can it lead to business inefficiencies, but it can even result in lost business opportunities.
Semantics can play a key role in making sure that all enterprise information is readily available,
especially the unstructured data. What is semantics study?

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. It uses the relations of linguistic
forms to non-linguistic concepts and mental representations to explain how sentences are
understood by native speakers.
Semantics can be broken down into the following three categories :

Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural language. In other words, it
intends to define the meaning of words and phrases based on its grammatical structure.
Conceptual semantics is the study of words at their core. It focuses on establishing universal
definitions for words before they are taken into context.
Lexical semenatics is the study of word meaning. It establishes meaning to words based on
their relationships to other words in the sentence as well as their compositional structure.
At its core, we think of semantics as the “magic” that happens when people communicate and,
most importantly, when they understand each other. This magic is actually a well-balanced
combination of:

understanding words and phrases;

having general knowledge;
and using real-world experience.
For example, to make sense out of a work of art, you need to combine the objective
representation with your knowledge of the world. When you consider words in context, you can
understand the meaning and the message. That’s semantics!

What Does Semantics study do?

Since we define what semantics is, we can understand why semantic technology is relevant for
some of the most critical business activities.

● Semantic technology is a way of processing content that relies on a variety of linguistic

techniques including text mining, entity extraction, concept analysis, natural language
processing, categorization, normalization and sentiment analysis.

● Compared to traditional technologies that process content as data, semantic technology

focuses not only on the data itself, but the relationships between pieces of data. When it
comes to analyzing text, this network of relations enables both high precision and recall
when performing search, automatic categorization and tagging activities.
 ● Because of its ability to understand the meaning of the words in context the way that
humans do, semantic technology can manage a huge knowledge base to integrate
information and data and allow organizations to find the information necessary to make
decisions.

● Information growth in terms of volume, velocity, variety and complexity, as well as in the
variety of ways in which it is being used, makes its management more difficult than ever
before. Here, semantics plays a key role in extracting meaning from unstructured data
and transforming that data into ready-to-use information.

The following are real-world examples of how semantic technology can be applied to specific
use cases.

Semantics for Knowledge Management :

Semantic technology helps organizations leverage unstructured information by transforming it

into usable, searchable and actionable intelligence. It does this by extracting key contextual
information that can be used to categorize information by its key elements. This enables
organizations to better manage their metadata and fuel process improvements.

Semantics for customer service :

To deliver a quality customer experience today, you must be able to do three things well:
streamline customer interactions, maintain a high level of customer satisfaction and listen to the
voice of the customer. Semantic technology enables you to implement advanced listening
platforms that facilitate faster responses to customer inquiries with information than can lead to
faster issue resolution.

Semantics for Operational Risk management :

External and internal sources contain valuable insight that can help you identify risk and mitigate
potential threats to your supply chain and operational ecosystem. To minimize operational risks
and threats hidden in your unstructured data, semantics can make the vast amount of content
required by support analysts readily available to fuel the risk assessment process with
actionable insight and intelligence.

Semantics is critical to so many core enterprise processes. How will it influence the future of
your organization?

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, which is the study of language. Pragmatics focuses on

conversational implicature, which is a process in which the speaker implies and a listener infers.
Simply put, pragmatics studies language that is not directly spoken. Instead, the speaker hints
at or suggests a meaning, and the listener assumes the correct intention.

● In a sense, pragmatics is seen as an understanding between people to obey certain

rules of interaction. In everyday language, the meanings of words and phrases are
constantly implied and not explicitly stated. In certain situations, words can have a
certain meaning. You might think that words always have a specifically defined meaning,
but that is not always the case. Pragmatics studies how words can be interpreted in
different ways based on the situation.

Example:
The definition might be a bit confusing, so let's look at some examples to clarify the role of
pragmatics in our language. This first example is one that you probably use in your own life
every day. Say you are in line at a store to pay for your purchases. The cashier asks, 'How are
you today?' Do you immediately go into an in-depth account of your health issues, varying
mood, relationship status, and everything else going on in your life? Of course not! Usually, you
respond with something similar to, 'Fine, how are you?' with the same expectation that the
cashier will not go into full detail of how she truly is. This interaction perfectly shows pragmatics
at work. It is understood that this question does not really ask you to explain everything going on
in your life. The implication relies on the context and situation. It is good manners to ask
strangers how they are, but it is not intended for a detailed response.

What is pragmatics in simple words?

In simple terms, pragmatics studies the way people use language. It generally examines cases
where a person's statement has one literal meaning and another unspoken or deeper meaning
.
Give example of pragmatics in
language?

One example of pragmatics in language would be if one person asked, "What do you want to
eat?" and another responded, "Ice cream is good this time of year." The second person did not
explicitly say what they wanted to eat, but their statement implies that they want to eat ice
cream. This sort of implication falls under the category of pragmatics.

What is example of learning pragmatics would be learning about language?

One example of learning pragmatics would be learning about figurative language: for instance,
learning to interpret the statement "I ran for a thousand miles" as an exaggeration rather than a
literal claim.

Syntax
Syntax is one of the main areas of linguistic research developed in recent decades. Generally, it
encompasses the entire study of how words are ordered in any language to produce a
meaningful sentence. It studies the structure and formation of sentences and explains how
words and phrases are arranged to form correct sentences. It deals with all rules that are
necessary to form up a particular language e.g. English, and how can these rules differ across
different languages?

● In syntax, we study arrangement of words in clauses, phrases and different sentences. It

also deals with the formation of sentences and relationship between different sentences.

● Generally, syntax refers to the rules that deals with words to form up phrases, clauses,
and sentences. After 1957, syntax became popular subjects for linguists and
anthropologists when Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, proposed transformational
grammar theory
.
The Etymology of word syntax

The word “syntax” came from Greek language which means: “arrange together”. The term,
syntax, is also used for the study of the syntactic properties of a human language.

In programming and computer contexts, the word syntax refers to the proper ordering of codes
so that the machine processor can understand proper instructions.

Example of Syntax in a sentence?

Sentences and phrases are formed up by a group of words and words have closer relationship
to each other. Syntax deals with this relation of words and formation of words in a sentence to
vary the meaning of the sentence.

Let’s look at an example of how meaning of a sentence can be varied.

● Emma ate mangos hurriedly.

● Emma hurriedly ate mangos.
● Hurriedly, Emma ate mangoes.
Now you have seen that by rearranging just one word ‘hurriedly’ in above sentence, we got
varied syntax. All sentences are grammatically correct with comprehensible meaning and
acceptable in English language.

It depends on writer’s choice to choose word according to his desire to form up a sentence.
English language is very flexible compared to other languages. Some of the languages are very
rigid and a writer has to follow multiple words to arrange words but it is not so in |English case.
In English, a writer has multiple options to arrange a sentence with same meaning. All this is the
job of syntax.
 Defination of Syntax according to Oxford English Dictionary
The definition of Syntax according to OED is “syntax is concerned with ‘the set of rules and
principles in a language’, which relate to how ‘words and phrases are arranged to create
well-formed sentences’.” (Oxford English Dictionary: 2015)

Full Definition of syntax according to Merriam Webster Dictionary

Merriam Webster Dictionary defines syntax as: “The way in which linguistic elements (such as
words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses).”
Syntax according to renowned linguistic
“It is syntax that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a sequence…to carry
meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right place”. (Burgess 1968)

“…the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up, you
understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu!
Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam
it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.” (Copeland, 2009)