Semantic Analysis Methods

Semantic analysis measures document similarity using different approaches to capture meaning, from simple vocabulary matching to deep neural representations.

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Methods

• Words: Lexical analysis using word frequency vectors (bag-of-words). Best for finding documents with shared terminology and vocabulary.
• N-grams: Phrase-based analysis capturing word sequences. Best for detecting similar phraseology and multi-word concepts.
• Embeddings: Deep semantic analysis using transformer models. Best for conceptual similarity regardless of exact wording, handles synonyms naturally.

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Usage

Choose method based on the analysis goals. Words and n-grams are faster and interpretable. Embeddings capture deeper meaning but require more computation. All methods use cosine similarity for comparison.

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