Aug
20
Semantic web: Search engines as secondary modeling systems II
Syntactic-morphological aspects: Equivalent semantics
Based on the secondary modeling system concepts and on the principles and parameters that regulate the activity of all languages, we can look at the current processing of words in internet searches by computational algorithms from its two relevant aspects: syntax-morphology and semantics.
Syntactic-morphological aspect of keywords
The syntactic-morphological aspect is governed by fixed principles in a context without meanings (free of semantics), which are inherent to the model system (language). Consequently, it uses its rules to analyze words.
The syntactic-morphological analysis process reduces the words to their roots, where the word is reduced to a linguistic lexeme by a stemming process in programming, (morphological analysis), and establishes the relationship between words in a keyword (syntactic analysis).
For example, imagine we have the following keyword: commercial contracting.
Morphological analysis
The words in the keyword are reduced to lexemes (the root from which other words can be derived) by the morphological analysis (stemming process). In this case, the lexemes would be:
commerc- contract-
The words commerce, commercial, commercialize, commercialization, etc., derive from these lexemes. As do contract, contracts, contractor, contracting, etc.
This analysis lets us accurately determine which words are directly related to each other, as they all are derived from one source lexeme.
Syntactic analysis
The syntactic analysis deals with the relationship between one word and others in the same syntagma (a horizontal relationship). A syntagma is a sentence, a phrase or, in our case, a keyword with more than one word.
Continuing with the same example, the syntactic analysis will determine the horizontal relationship between the words in the keyword: commercial contracting. This analysis allows us to determine two word orders for the keyword according to the position each word has in the syntagma or keyword. Therefore, syntactically, there are two possibilities:
commercial contracting contracting commercial
This change modifies the order or position of the words, but not their meanings or semantics.
Conclusion
This leads us to our first conclusion. In the syntactic-morphological analysis, we can see changes governed by a model system (the grammar of a language) in a context without interpretations or meanings that relate to a context in use. Consequently, the order and the form of a word in a keyword are changed but their semantics are reduced to a set of rules that exclude it in this analysis: semantics between one or another form of the keyword is an example of equivalent semantics.
The three main factors that alter a keyword syntactically and morphologically, but that do not modify their semantics when a search is performed on a search engine, are:
- 1. Variations of singular and plural.
- 2. Variations in the order of words that make up a keyword.
- 3. The use of connectors, prepositions for example.
This topic is broken down into 3 parts, in which we will discuss the aspects to be kept in mind when analyzing keywords:
- 1. Semantic web: Search engines as secondary modeling systems I >> General aspects regarding the analysis of keywords.
- 2. Semantic web: Search engines as secondary modeling systems II >> Syntactic-morphological aspects regarding the analysis of keywords.
- 3. Semantic web: Search engines as secondary modeling systems III >> Semantic aspects regarding the analysis of keywords.
