In machine learning, semantic analysis of a text corpus is the task of building structures that approximate concepts from a large set of documents. It generally does not involve prior semantic understanding of the documents.

Semantic analysis strategies include:

Stochastic semantic analysis

Stochastic semantic analysis is an approach used in computer science as a semantic component of natural language understanding.

Stochastic models generally use the definition of segments of words as basic semantic units for the semantic models, and in some cases involve a two layered approach.

Example applications have a wide range. In machine translation, it has been applied to the translation of spontaneous conversational speech among different languages. In the area of spoken language understanding the fact that spoken sentences often do not follow the grammar of a language and involve self-corrections, repetitions, and other irregularities, the use of stochastic semantic has been suggested as a natural fit to achieve robustness to deal with noise due to the spontaneous nature of spoken language.

See also