The Semantics’ place in Computer science
In computer science, semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.
In this regard, semantics permits programs to be separated into their syntactical part (grammatical structure) and their semantic part (meaning).
Semantics for computer applications falls into three categories:
- 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 as expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are ignored.
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.
Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example <meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer">
At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.
Semantics in Psychology
In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience, while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep; the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network.
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In a network created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind; and include "part of", "kind of", and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines.
Semantics has been reported to drive the course of psychotherapeutic interventions. Language structure can determine the treatment approach to drug-abusing patients. While working in Europe for the US Information Agency, American psychiatrist Dr. A. James Giannini reported semantic differences in medical approaches to addiction treatment. English-speaking countries used the term "drug dependence" to describe a rather passive pathology in their patients. As a result the physician's role was more active. Southern European countries such as Italy and Yugoslavia utilized the concept of "tossicomania" (i.e. toxic mania) to describe a more active rather than passive role of the addict. As a result the treating physician's role shifted to that of a more passive guide than that of an active interventionist.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics studies the ways that context affects meaning.
The term "pragmatics" was introduced by the Logical Positivist, Rudolf Carnap. This was an attempt to reduce subjective meaning to a secondary status and to treat what remained as objective. In short, while we all use objectified meaning and consider context important, when communication breaks down, then the primacy of subjective meaning becomes overwhelming, especially when we finally ask: "What do YOU mean?"
The two primary forms of context important to pragmatics are linguistic context and situational context.
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Nevertheless as we attempt to understand meaning without directly considering subjective factors, the importance of linguistic context as an indirect way of doing becomes exceptionally important especially when looking at particular linguistic problems such as pronouns. In most situations, for example, the pronoun him in the sentence "Joe also saw him" has a radically different meaning if preceded by "Jerry said he saw a guy riding an elephant", or "Jerry saw the bank robber", or "Jerry saw your dog run that way". Indeed, studying context is about the only path in realistic speech or writing for understanding semantics and pragmatics without referring to meaning as intent and assumptions.
Situational context refers to every non-linguistic factor that affects the meaning of a phrase. Nearly anything can be included in the list, from the time of day to the people involved to the location of the speaker or the temperature of the room.
An example of situational context at work is evident in the phrase "it's cold in here", which can either be a simple statement of fact or a request to turn up the heat, or to close the window, depending on other things, whether or not it is believed to be in the listener's power to affect the temperature.
Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
Pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication. Suppose a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking. This could be achieved by using several utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning.
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