Semantic Engine
(Part III)

Statistical, probabilistic and cognitive analyses (Semantic Analysis)

Tropes performs different types of text analyses:

• statistics on the total frequency of occurrence of the main Word categories and of their subcategories,
• statistics on the co-occurrence and connection rates of Equivalent classes and Word categories,
• a probabilistic analysis of the words occurring in Bundles,
• a geometric analysis of the Bundles delimiting the Episodes,
• a Cognitive-Discursive Analysis (CDA), by which the Most Characteristic Parts of a text can be detected.

The statistics are used for various purposes, among others to create the graphs and set out the results.

The Frequent word categories and the Text Style are obtained by comparing the distribution of the occurrence frequency of the categories observed in the text with linguistic production norms. These norms have been derived from the study of a great number of different texts. They are stored in specific in-built tables.

References and Relations (Semantic Analysis)

The Equivalent Classes constitute groups of closely related meanings (common nouns, proper nouns, trademarks, etc.) appearing frequently throughout the text. For example, "father" and "mother" are grouped together into the "family" class.

The Reference Fields group together the words comprising the Equivalent Classes in order to enable the software to build up a representation of the context. To achieve this, the Semantic equivalents dictionary of Tropes is composed of three different classification levels. At the lowest level are the References, which are next merged more broadly into Reference fields 2, which, in turn, are merged into Reference fields 1.

In the example below, the word "Lord Chancellor" belongs to the "minister" Reference, included in the "government" field 2, which is part of the "politics" field 1. The "politics" field 1 includes broader concepts, such as "political system", "foreign policy", etc.

Fields 1	Fields 2	References	Words
Politics	Political system	Communism	Communism
Politics	Political system	Communism	Marxism
Politics	Political system	Democracy	Democracy
Politics	Political system	Democracy	Republic
Politics	Government	Federal government	Federal government
Politics	Government	Head of Government	Head of Government
Politics	Government	Head of Government	Prime Minister
Politics	Government	Minister	Lord Chancellor
Politics	Government	Minister	Minister
Politics	Government	Minister	Secretary of State
Politics	Government	Government	Government

 

Read the next part:
Chronology, Summarization and Style

 

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