Semantic network

A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that

represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often
used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected
graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges, which
represent semantic relations between concepts,[1] mapping or connecting
semantic fields. A semantic network may be instantiated as, for example, a
graph database or a concept map. Typical standardized semantic networks Example of a semantic
are expressed as semantic triples. network

Semantic networks are used in natural language processing applications

such as semantic parsing[2] and word-sense disambiguation.[3] Semantic networks can also be used as a
method to analyze large texts and identify the main themes and topics (e.g., of social media posts), to reveal
biases (e.g., in news coverage), or even to map an entire research field.[4]

History
Examples of the use of semantic networks in logic, directed acyclic graphs as a mnemonic tool, dates back
centuries. The earliest documented use being the Greek philosopher Porphyry's commentary on Aristotle's
categories in the third century AD.

In computing history, "Semantic Nets" for the propositional calculus were first implemented for computers
by Richard H. Richens of the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1956 as an "interlingua" for machine
translation of natural languages,[5] although the importance of this work and the CLRU was only belatedly
realized.

Semantic networks were also independently implemented by Robert F. Simmons[6] and Sheldon Klein,
using the first order predicate calculus as a base, after being inspired by a demonstration of Victor Yngve.
The "line of research was originated by the first President of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
Victor Yngve, who in 1960 had published descriptions of algorithms for using a phrase structure grammar
to generate syntactically well-formed nonsense sentences. Sheldon Klein and I about 1962-1964 were
fascinated by the technique and generalized it to a method for controlling the sense of what was generated
by respecting the semantic dependencies of words as they occurred in text."[7] Other researchers, most
notably M. Ross Quillian[8] and others at System Development Corporation helped contribute to their work
in the early 1960s as part of the SYNTHEX project. It's from these publications at SDC that most modern
derivatives of the term "semantic network" cite as their background. Later prominent works were done by
Allan M. Collins and Quillian (e.g., Collins and Quillian;[9][10] Collins and Loftus[11]
Quillian[12][13][14][15]). Still later in 2006, Hermann Helbig fully described MultiNet.[16]

In the late 1980s, two Netherlands universities, Groningen and Twente, jointly began a project called
Knowledge Graphs, which are semantic networks but with the added constraint that edges are restricted to
be from a limited set of possible relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph.[17] In the subsequent decades,
the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred.[18][19] In 2012, Google
gave their knowledge graph the name Knowledge Graph.
The semantic link network was systematically studied as a semantic social networking method. Its basic
model consists of semantic nodes, semantic links between nodes, and a semantic space that defines the
semantics of nodes and links and reasoning rules on semantic links. The systematic theory and model was
published in 2004.[20] This research direction can trace to the definition of inheritance rules for efficient
model retrieval in 1998[21] and the Active Document Framework ADF.[22] Since 2003, research has
developed toward social semantic networking.[23] This work is a systematic innovation at the age of the
World Wide Web and global social networking rather than an application or simple extension of the
Semantic Net (Network). Its purpose and scope are different from that of the Semantic Net (or
network).[24] The rules for reasoning and evolution and automatic discovery of implicit links play an
important role in the Semantic Link Network.[25][26] Recently it has been developed to support Cyber-
Physical-Social Intelligence.[27] It was used for creating a general summarization method.[28] The self-
organised Semantic Link Network was integrated with a multi-dimensional category space to form a
semantic space to support advanced applications with multi-dimensional abstractions and self-organised
semantic links[29][30] It has been verified that Semantic Link Network play an important role in
understanding and representation through text summarisation applications.[31][32] Semantic Link Network
has been extended from cyberspace to cyber-physical-social space. Competition relation and symbiosis
relation as well as their roles in evolving society were studied in the emerging topic: Cyber-Physical-Social
Intelligence[33]

More specialized forms of semantic networks has been created for specific use. For example, in 2008,
Fawsy Bendeck's PhD thesis formalized the Semantic Similarity Network (SSN) that contains specialized
relationships and propagation algorithms to simplify the semantic similarity representation and
calculations.[34]

Basics of semantic networks

A semantic network is used when one has knowledge that is best understood as a set of concepts that are
related to one another.

Most semantic networks are cognitively based. They also consist of arcs and nodes which can be organized
into a taxonomic hierarchy. Semantic networks contributed ideas of spreading activation, inheritance, and
nodes as proto-objects.

One process of constructing semantic networks, known also as co-occurrence networks, includes
identifying keywords in the text, calculating the frequencies of co-occurrences, and analyzing the networks
to find central words and clusters of themes in the network.[35]

Examples

In Lisp

The following code shows an example of a semantic network in the Lisp programming language using an
association list.

(setq *database*
'((canary (is-a bird)
(color yellow)
(size small))
(penguin (is-a bird)
(movement swim))
(bird (is-a vertebrate)
 (has-part wings)
(reproduction egg-laying))))

To extract all the information about the "canary" type, one would use the assoc function with a key of
"canary".[36]

WordNet

An example of a semantic network is WordNet, a lexical database of English. It groups English words into
sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic
relations between these synonym sets. Some of the most common semantic relations defined are meronymy
(A is a meronym of B if A is part of B), holonymy (B is a holonym of A if B contains A), hyponymy (or
troponymy) (A is subordinate of B; A is kind of B), hypernymy (A is superordinate of B), synonymy (A
denotes the same as B) and antonymy (A denotes the opposite of B).

WordNet properties have been studied from a network theory perspective and compared to other semantic
networks created from Roget's Thesaurus and word association tasks. From this perspective the three of
them are a small world structure.[37]

Other examples

It is also possible to represent logical descriptions using semantic networks such as the existential graphs of
Charles Sanders Peirce or the related conceptual graphs of John F. Sowa.[1] These have expressive power
equal to or exceeding standard first-order predicate logic. Unlike WordNet or other lexical or browsing
networks, semantic networks using these representations can be used for reliable automated logical
deduction. Some automated reasoners exploit the graph-theoretic features of the networks during
processing.

Other examples of semantic networks are Gellish models. Gellish English with its Gellish English
dictionary, is a formal language that is defined as a network of relations between concepts and names of
concepts. Gellish English is a formal subset of natural English, just as Gellish Dutch is a formal subset of
Dutch, whereas multiple languages share the same concepts. Other Gellish networks consist of knowledge
models and information models that are expressed in the Gellish language. A Gellish network is a network
of (binary) relations between things. Each relation in the network is an expression of a fact that is classified
by a relation type. Each relation type itself is a concept that is defined in the Gellish language dictionary.
Each related thing is either a concept or an individual thing that is classified by a concept. The definitions of
concepts are created in the form of definition models (definition networks) that together form a Gellish
Dictionary. A Gellish network can be documented in a Gellish database and is computer interpretable.

SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base for scientific resources. It provides unambiguous
identifiers (Research Resource IDentifiers or RRIDs) for software, lab tools etc. and it also provides options
to create links between RRIDs and from communities.

Another example of semantic networks, based on category theory, is ologs. Here each type is an object,
representing a set of things, and each arrow is a morphism, representing a function. Commutative diagrams
also are prescribed to constrain the semantics.

In the social sciences people sometimes use the term semantic network to refer to co-occurrence
networks.[38][39] The basic idea is that words that co-occur in a unit of text, e.g. a sentence, are
semantically related to one another. Ties based on co-occurrence can then be used to construct semantic
networks. This process includes identifying keywords in the text, constructing co-occurrence networks, and
analyzing the networks to find central words and clusters of themes in the network. It is a particularly useful
method to analyze large text and big data.[40]

Software tools
There are also elaborate types of semantic networks connected with corresponding sets of software tools
used for lexical knowledge engineering, like the Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) of Stuart
C. Shapiro[41] or the MultiNet paradigm of Hermann Helbig,[42] especially suited for the semantic
representation of natural language expressions and used in several NLP applications.

Semantic networks are used in specialized information retrieval tasks, such as plagiarism detection. They
provide information on hierarchical relations in order to employ semantic compression to reduce language
diversity and enable the system to match word meanings, independently from sets of words used.

The Knowledge Graph proposed by Google in 2012 is actually an application of semantic network in
search engine.

Modeling multi-relational data like semantic networks in low-dimensional spaces through forms of
embedding has benefits in expressing entity relationships as well as extracting relations from mediums like
text. There are many approaches to learning these embeddings, notably using Bayesian clustering
frameworks or energy-based frameworks, and more recently, TransE[43] (NIPS 2013). Applications of
embedding knowledge base data include Social network analysis and Relationship extraction.

See also
Abstract semantic graph Semantic similarity network
Chunking (psychology) Semantic neural network
CmapTools SemEval – an ongoing series of
Concept map evaluations of computational semantic
analysis systems
Formal semantics (natural language)
Sparse distributed memory
Network diagram
Ontology (information science) Taxonomy (general)
Repertory grid Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
Semantic lexicon Word-sense disambiguation (WSD)
Resource Description Framework

Other examples
Cognition Network Technology
Lexipedia
OpenCog
Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS)
Schema.org
SNOMED CT
Universal Networking Language (UNL)
Wikidata
 Freebase

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Further reading
Allen, J. and A. Frisch (1982). "What's in a Semantic Network (http://www.aclweb.org/antholo
gy/P82-1004)". In: Proceedings of the 20th. annual meeting of ACL, Toronto, pp. 19–27.
John F. Sowa, Alexander Borgida (1991). Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in
the Representation of Knowledge (https://books.google.com/books?id=lTKnCQAAQBAJ).
Segev, E. (Ed.) (2022). Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences (https://routledge.pub/
SemanticNetworkAnalysis). New York: Routledge.

External links
"Semantic Networks" (http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnet.htm) by John F. Sowa
"Semantic Link Network" (https://web.archive.org/web/20091218102540/http://www.knowled
gegrid.net/~h.zhuge/SLN.htm) by Hai Zhuge

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