Social Semantics

Social Semantics
Author: Harry Halpin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1461418852

Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web provides a unique introduction to identity and reference theories of the World Wide Web, through the academic lens of philosophy of language and data-driven statistical models. The Semantic Web is a natural evolution of the Web, and this book covers the URL-based Web architecture and Semantic Web in detail. It has a robust empirical side which has an impact on industry. Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web discusses how the largest problem facing the Semantic Web is the problem of identity and reference, and how these are the results of a larger general theory of meaning. This book hypothesizes that statistical semantics can solve these problems, illustrated by case studies ranging from a pioneering study of tagging systems to using the Semantic Web to boost the results of commercial search engines. Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web targets practitioners working in the related fields of the semantic web, search engines, information retrieval, philosophers of language and more. Advanced-level students and researchers focusing on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text or reference book.

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition
Author: Carsten Levisen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110294656

Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.

The Social Semantic Web

The Social Semantic Web
Author: John G Breslin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2009-10-03
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642011721

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas. After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge. The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

Semantic Cognition

Semantic Cognition
Author: Timothy T. Rogers
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2004
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262182393

A mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge that uses distributed connectionist networks as a starting point for a psychological theory of semantic cognition.

Understanding Semantics

Understanding Semantics
Author: Sebastian Loebner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134647158

This series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to all the major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. Understanding Semantics offers a complete introduction to linguistic semantics. The book takes a step-by-step approach, starting with the basic concepts and moving through the central questions to examine the methods and results of the science of linguistic meaning. Understanding Semantics unites the treatment of a broad scale of phenomena using data from different languages with a thorough investigation of major theoretical perspectives. It leads the reader from their intuitive knowledge of meaning to a deeper understanding of the use of scientific reasoning in the study of language as a communicative tool, of the nature of linguistic meaning, and of the scope and limitations of linguistic semantics. Ideal as a first textbook in semantics for undergraduate students of linguistics, this book is also recommended for students of literature, philosophy, psychology and cognitive science.

Semantics and Social Science (Routledge Revivlas)

Semantics and Social Science (Routledge Revivlas)
Author: Graham MacDonald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136838619

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.

Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation

Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation
Author: Lauren Hall-Lew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108633609

The 'third wave' of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning.

Social Networks with Rich Edge Semantics

Social Networks with Rich Edge Semantics
Author: Quan Zheng
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1315390604

Social Networks with Rich Edge Semantics introduces a new mechanism for representing social networks in which pairwise relationships can be drawn from a range of realistic possibilities, including different types of relationships, different strengths in the directions of a pair, positive and negative relationships, and relationships whose intensities change with time. For each possibility, the book shows how to model the social network using spectral embedding. It also shows how to compose the techniques so that multiple edge semantics can be modeled together, and the modeling techniques are then applied to a range of datasets. Features Introduces the reader to difficulties with current social network analysis, and the need for richer representations of relationships among nodes, including accounting for intensity, direction, type, positive/negative, and changing intensities over time Presents a novel mechanism to allow social networks with qualitatively different kinds of relationships to be described and analyzed Includes extensions to the important technique of spectral embedding, shows that they are mathematically well motivated and proves that their results are appropriate Shows how to exploit embeddings to understand structures within social networks, including subgroups, positional significance, link or edge prediction, consistency of role in different contexts, and net flow of properties through a node Illustrates the use of the approach for real-world problems for online social networks, criminal and drug smuggling networks, and networks where the nodes are themselves groups Suitable for researchers and students in social network research, data science, statistical learning, and related areas, this book will help to provide a deeper understanding of real-world social networks.

Semantics Empowered Web 3.0

Semantics Empowered Web 3.0
Author: Amit Sheth
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 303101894X

After the traditional document-centric Web 1.0 and user-generated content focused Web 2.0, Web 3.0 has become a repository of an ever growing variety of Web resources that include data and services associated with enterprises, social networks, sensors, cloud, as well as mobile and other devices that constitute the Internet of Things. These pose unprecedented challenges in terms of heterogeneity (variety), scale (volume), and continuous changes (velocity), as well as present corresponding opportunities if they can be exploited. Just as semantics has played a critical role in dealing with data heterogeneity in the past to provide interoperability and integration, it is playing an even more critical role in dealing with the challenges and helping users and applications exploit all forms of Web 3.0 data. This book presents a unified approach to harness and exploit all forms of contemporary Web resources using the core principles of ability to associate meaning with data through conceptual or domain models and semantic descriptions including annotations, and through advanced semantic techniques for search, integration, and analysis. It discusses the use of Semantic Web standards and techniques when appropriate, but also advocates the use of lighter weight, easier to use, and more scalable options when they are more suitable. The authors' extensive experience spanning research and prototypes to development of operational applications and commercial technologies and products guide the treatment of the material. Table of Contents: Role of Semantics and Metadata / Types and Models of Semantics / Annotation -- Adding Semantics to Data / Semantics for Enterprise Data / Semantics for Services / Semantics for Sensor Data / Semantics for Social Data / Semantics for Cloud Computing / Semantics for Advanced Applications

Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences

Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences
Author: Elad Segev
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000471918

Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences introduces the fundamentals of semantic network analysis and its applications in the social sciences. Readers learn how to easily transform any given text into a visual network of words co-occurring together, a process that allows mapping the main themes appearing in the text and revealing its main narratives and biases. Semantic network analysis is particularly useful today with the increasing volumes of text-based information available. It is one of the developing, cutting-edge methods to organize, identify patterns and structures, and understand the meanings of our information society. The first chapters in this book offer step-by-step guidelines for conducting semantic network analysis, including choosing and preparing the text, selecting desired words, constructing the networks, and interpreting their meanings. Free software tools and code are also presented. The rest of the book displays state-of-the-art studies from around the world that apply this method to explore news, political speeches, social media content, and even to organize interview transcripts and literature reviews. Aimed at scholars with no previous knowledge in the field, this book can be used as a main or a supplementary textbook for general courses on research methods or network analysis courses, as well as a starting point to conduct your own content analysis of large texts.