Semantic fields are groups of words with related meanings, often belonging to one category. They have applications in anthropology and computational linguistics, and can reveal cultural attitudes towards objects. Computational linguistics uses semantic fields to extract information from text by searching for hypernyms.
In linguistics, a semantic field is a group of words with related meanings. Words in a semantic field usually belong to one category, such as agricultural words or weather words. Semantic fields have applications in anthropology and computational linguistics. From an anthropological point of view, the types of words found in a semantic field within a given language often have cultural significance. The field of computational linguistics sometimes uses understanding of semantic fields to automatically generate definitions of words within a text.
Linguists generally agree that a given language has a finite number of semantic fields and subfields, although they may disagree on the exact categories. There are an infinite number of ways that words from various semantic fields can be combined, but only a limited number of object categories that can be verbalized. Within a semantic field, there can be a wide variety of words with overlapping meanings and varying levels of formality. For example, “tree” and “conifer” are both words that fall into the broad category of “nature words.” “Conifer,” however, is both more specific and more formal or scientific.
At the application level, the words within a given semantic field are often related to cultural attitudes towards the objects that the field describes. For example, different languages have different numbers and types of words for family relationships. In Swahili, baba means both “father” and “uncle”. This is indicative of the way households often function in East African societies: uncles often play as important a role in a person’s life as one’s father.
Another use of semantic fields is in computational linguistics, where computer programs are written to produce or parse text. Computational linguistics programs sometimes use semantic fields to extract information from a text. These programs can search for hypernyms, or words that describe a category, to find definitions of words within a text. For example, “food” is a hypernym whose category members include “cookie,” “pig,” and “sushi.” A computational linguist could write a program to look up definitions of various food items by looking for phrases like “is a food” or “is a type of food.”
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