Semantics:
According to Wikipedia Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning, in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.
Semantics as a field of study has significant ties to various representational theories of meaning including truth theories of meaning, coherence theories of meaning, and correspondence theories of meaning. Each of these is related to the general philosophical study of reality and the representation of meaning.
In 1960s semantic differential (SD) method was used to measure the semantics or meaning of words, particularly adjectives, and their referent concepts.
This new branch of study has its applications in computer science. For example the semantics of programming languages and other languages is an important issue and area of study in computer science. Like the syntax of a language, its semantics can be defined exactly.
For instance, the following statements use different syntaxes, but cause the same instructions to be executed, namely, perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and store the result in a variable called 'x':
| Statement | Programming languages |
|---|---|
x += y |
C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python |
$x += $y |
Perl, PHP |
x = x + y |
BASIC; Fortran, MATLAB, |
Various ways have been developed to describe the semantics of programming languages formally, building on mathematical logic:
- Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the computation it induces when it is executed on a machine. In particular, it is of interest how the effect of a computation is produced.
- Denotational semantics: Meanings are modelled by mathematical objects that represent the effect of executing the constructs. Thus only the effect is of interest, not how it is obtained.
- Axiomatic semantics: Specific properties of the effect of executing the constructs are expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are ignored.
There is also the Computational semantics which is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.
Some traditional topics of interest is construction of meaning representations. Methods employed usually draw from formal semantics or statistical semantics. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of lexical semantics (word sense disambiguation and semantic role labeling), discourse semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning (in particular, automated theorem proving). Since 1999 there has been an ACL special interest group on computational semantics, SIGSEM.
Actually these fields and titles are interesting for more investigation
Comments
Post a Comment