Wednesday, August 09, 2006

LSA OMG

One of the things that I'm interested in is a concept known as Latent Semantic Analysis. In very general terms (which is the level at which I understand it), latent semantic analysis is the process of analyzing a block of text by deconstructing it. You look at the words in a text, and analyze where they are and where they are in relation to other words. Since I don't get the chance to read about this very much, and when I do what I read is way above my head, I set up an alert in the Google search engine, so that when the phrase latent semantic analysis comes up, it will tell me about it. Basically, I'm looking for lightweight, easily-digestible references to the concept.

I received this alert this morning.

O. M. G. ..I haven't seen so many Greek characters since I went to the cultural festival at the local Greek Orthodox Church.

5 comments:

Sweeti said...

Boy, this may show some ignorance on my part but...I didn't even know there was such a term.
Now my question...what would you use the info that you disseminate from this for?

Cerulean Bill said...

I'd hardly call it ignorance -- I think you have to be into language analysis to have ever heard of it. Google uses it to rank pages. Its also used to make text searches more effective.

Sweeti said...

Interesting, I learned something new today thanks.

genderist said...

Opa!

Cerulean Bill said...

Is that like the Swedish Uff Da?