Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics Open Textbook Library

Probabilistic latent semantic analysis Wikipedia

semantics analysis

This can entail figuring out the text’s primary ideas and themes and their connections. To become an NLP engineer, you’ll need a four-year degree in a subject related to this field, such as computer science, data science, or engineering. If you really want to increase your employability, earning a master’s degree can help you acquire a job in this industry. Finally, some companies provide apprenticeships and internships in which you can discover whether becoming an NLP engineer is the right career for you. Prototypical categories exhibit degrees of category membership; not every member is equally representative for a category.

semantics analysis

Description logics separate the knowledge one wants to represent from the implementation of underlying inference. There is no notion of implication and there are no explicit variables, allowing inference to be highly optimized and efficient. Instead, inferences are implemented using structure matching and subsumption among complex concepts. One concept will subsume all other concepts that include the same, or more specific versions of, its constraints. These processes are made more efficient by first normalizing all the concept definitions so that constraints appear in a  canonical order and any information about a particular role is merged together.

Type checking is an important part of semantic analysis where compiler makes sure that each operator has matching operands. By integrating Semantic Text Analysis into their core operations, businesses, search engines, and academic institutions are all able to make sense of the torrent of textual information at their fingertips. This not only facilitates smarter decision-making, but it also ushers in a new era of efficiency and discovery. Together, these technologies forge a potent combination, empowering you to dissect and interpret complex information seamlessly.

This AI-driven tool not only identifies factual data, like t he number of forest fires or oceanic pollution levels but also understands the public’s emotional response to these events. By correlating data and sentiments, EcoGuard provides actionable and valuable insights to NGOs, governments, and corporations to drive their environmental initiatives in alignment with public concerns and sentiments. It is the first part of semantic analysis, in which we study the meaning of individual words. These career paths offer immense potential for professionals passionate about the intersection of AI and language understanding. With the growing demand for semantic analysis expertise, individuals in these roles have the opportunity to shape the future of AI applications and contribute to transforming industries. Sentiment analysis, a branch of semantic analysis, focuses on deciphering the emotions, opinions, and attitudes expressed in textual data.

Semantic Analysis Is Part of a Semantic System

To store them all would require a huge database containing many words that actually have the same meaning. Popular algorithms for stemming include the Porter stemming algorithm from 1979, which still works well. For Example, Tagging Twitter mentions by sentiment to get a sense of how customers feel about your product and can identify unhappy customers in real-time. With the help of meaning representation, we can link linguistic elements to non-linguistic elements. Lexical analysis is based on smaller tokens but on the contrary, the semantic analysis focuses on larger chunks. As an introductory text, this book provides a broad range of topics and includes an extensive range of terminology.

Four types of information are identified to represent the meaning of individual sentences. Semantic analysis offers promising career prospects in fields such as NLP engineering, data science, and AI research. NLP engineers specialize in developing algorithms for semantic analysis and natural language processing, while data scientists extract valuable insights from textual data. AI researchers focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in semantic analysis and related fields. These career paths provide professionals with the opportunity to contribute to the development of innovative AI solutions and unlock the potential of textual data. By analyzing the dictionary definitions and relationships between words, computers can better understand the context in which words are used.

With the help of semantic analysis, machine learning tools can recognize a ticket either as a “Payment issue” or a“Shipping problem”. By automating repetitive tasks such as data extraction, categorization, and analysis, organizations can streamline operations and allocate resources more efficiently. Semantic analysis also helps identify emerging trends, monitor market sentiments, and analyze competitor strategies.

Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals. In Meaning Representation, we employ these basic units to represent textual information.

Rosch concluded that the tendency to define categories in a rigid way clashes with the actual psychological situation. Instead of clear demarcations between equally important conceptual areas, one finds marginal areas between categories that are unambiguously defined only in their focal points. This observation was taken over and elaborated in linguistic lexical semantics (see Hanks, 2013; Taylor, 2003). Specifically, it was applied not just to the internal structure of a single word meaning, but also to the structure of polysemous words, that is, to the relationship between the various meanings of a word.

  • Accurately measuring the performance and accuracy of AI/NLP models is a crucial step in understanding how well they are working.
  • And if companies need to find the best price for specific materials, natural language processing can review various websites and locate the optimal price.
  • One extension of the field approach, then, consists of taking a syntagmatic point of view.

Its prowess in both lexical semantics and syntactic analysis enables the extraction of invaluable insights from diverse sources. The amount and types of information can make it difficult for your company to obtain the knowledge you need to help the business run efficiently, so it is important to know how to use semantic analysis and why. Using semantic analysis to acquire structured information can help you shape your business’s future, especially in customer service. In this field, semantic analysis allows options for faster responses, leading to faster resolutions for problems. Additionally, for employees working in your operational risk management division, semantic analysis technology can quickly and completely provide the information necessary to give you insight into the risk assessment process.

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Moreover, they don’t just parse text; they extract valuable information, discerning opposite meanings and extracting relationships between words. Efficiently working behind the scenes, semantic analysis excels in understanding language and inferring intentions, emotions, and context. If the sentence within the scope of a lambda variable includes the same variable as one in its argument, then the variables in the argument should be renamed to eliminate the clash. The other special case is when the expression within the scope of a lambda involves what is known as “intensionality”. Since the logics for these are quite complex and the circumstances for needing them rare, here we will consider only sentences that do not involve intensionality.

The field of natural language processing is still relatively new, and as such, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome in order to build robust NLP systems. Different words can have different meanings in different contexts, which makes it difficult for machines to understand them correctly. Furthermore, humans often use slang or colloquialisms that machines find difficult to comprehend. Another challenge lies in being able to identify the intent behind a statement or ask; current NLP models usually rely on rule-based approaches that lack the flexibility and adaptability needed for complex tasks. AI is used in a variety of ways when it comes to NLP, ranging from simple keyword searches to more complex tasks such as sentiment analysis and automatic summarization.

While early versions of CycL were described as being a frame language, more recent versions are described as a logic that supports frame-like structures and inferences. Cycorp, started by Douglas Lenat in 1984, has been an ongoing project for more than 35 years and they claim that it is now the longest-lived artificial intelligence project[29]. The distinction between polysemy and vagueness is not unproblematic, methodologically speaking.

Semantic analysis also enhances company performance by automating tasks, allowing employees to focus on critical inquiries. It can also fine-tune SEO strategies by understanding users’ searches and delivering optimized content. Semantic analysis has revolutionized market research by enabling organizations to analyze and extract valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured data. By analyzing customer reviews, social media conversations, and online forums, businesses can identify emerging market trends, monitor competitor activities, and gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences. These insights help organizations develop targeted marketing strategies, identify new business opportunities, and stay competitive in dynamic market environments. Semantic analysis helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers by analyzing customer queries, feedback, and satisfaction surveys.

This formal structure that is used to understand the meaning of a text is called meaning representation. PLSA has applications in information retrieval and filtering, natural language processing, machine learning from text, bioinformatics,[2] and related areas. For SQL, we must assume that a database has been defined such that we can select columns from a table (called Customers) for rows where the Last_Name column (or relation) has ‘Smith’ for its value. For the Python expression we need to have an object with a defined member function that allows the keyword argument “last_name”. Until recently, creating procedural semantics had only limited appeal to developers because the difficulty of using natural language to express commands did not justify the costs.

The graph and its CGIF equivalent express that it is in both Tom and Mary’s belief context, but not necessarily the real world. Ontology editing tools are freely available; the most widely used is Protégé, which claims to have over 300,000 registered users. NLP-powered apps can check for spelling errors, highlight unnecessary or misapplied grammar and even suggest simpler ways to organize sentences.

Without going into detail (for a full treatment, see Geeraerts, 1993), let us illustrate the first type of problem. In the case of autohyponymous words, for instance, the definitional approach does not reveal an ambiguity, whereas the truth-theoretical criterion does. Dog is autohyponymous between the readings ‘Canis familiaris,’ contrasting with cat or wolf, and ‘male Canis familiaris,’ contrasting with bitch. A definition of dog as ‘male Canis familiaris,’ however, does not conform to the definitional criterion of maximal coverage, because it defines a proper subset of the ‘Canis familiaris’ reading. On the other hand, the sentence Lady is a dog, but not a dog, which exemplifies the logical criterion, cannot be ruled out as ungrammatical. While NLP-powered chatbots and callbots are most common in customer service contexts, companies have also relied on natural language processing to power virtual assistants.

If the grammatical relationship between both occurrences requires their semantic identity, the resulting sentence may be an indication for the polysemy of the item. For instance, the so-called identity test involves ‘identity-of-sense anaphora.’ Thus, at midnight the ship passed the port, and so did the bartender is awkward if the two lexical meanings of port are at stake. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Disregarding puns, it can only mean that the ship and the bartender alike passed the harbor, or conversely that both moved a particular kind of wine from one place to another. A mixed reading, in which the first occurrence of port refers to the harbor and the second to wine, is normally excluded.

Natural language processing and machine learning algorithms play a crucial role in achieving human-level accuracy in semantic analysis. In summary, semantic analysis works by comprehending the meaning and context of language. It incorporates techniques such as lexical semantics and machine learning algorithms to achieve a deeper understanding of human language. By leveraging these techniques, semantic analysis enhances language comprehension and empowers AI systems to provide more accurate and context-aware responses. This approach focuses on understanding the definitions and meanings of individual words.

NLP can also be trained to pick out unusual information, allowing teams to spot fraudulent claims. Recruiters and HR personnel can use natural language processing to sift through hundreds of resumes, picking out promising candidates based on keywords, education, skills and other criteria. In addition, NLP’s data analysis capabilities are ideal for reviewing employee surveys and quickly determining how employees feel about the workplace.

Indeed, semantic analysis is pivotal, fostering better user experiences and enabling more efficient information retrieval and processing. What sets semantic analysis apart from other technologies is that it focuses more on how pieces of data work together instead of just focusing solely on the data as singular words strung together. Understanding the human context of words, phrases, and sentences gives your company the ability to build its database, allowing you to access more information and make informed decisions. The SNePS framework has been used to address representations of a variety of complex quantifiers, connectives, and actions, which are described in The SNePS Case Frame Dictionary and related papers. SNePS also included a mechanism for embedding procedural semantics, such as using an iteration mechanism to express a concept like, “While the knob is turned, open the door”. The notion of a procedural semantics was first conceived to describe the compilation and execution of computer programs when programming was still new.

If you’re interested in a career that involves semantic analysis, working as a natural language processing engineer is a good choice. Essentially, in this position, you would translate human language into a format a machine can understand. Semantic analysis is the process of understanding the meaning and interpretation of words, signs and sentence structure. I say this partly because semantic analysis is one of the toughest parts of natural language processing and it’s not fully solved yet. Semantic analysis is the process of interpreting words within a given context so that their underlying meanings become clear.

3.1 Using First Order Predicate Logic for NL Semantics

To summarize, natural language processing in combination with deep learning, is all about vectors that represent words, phrases, etc. and to some degree their meanings. Relationship extraction takes the named entities of NER and tries to identify the semantic relationships between them. This could mean, for example, finding out who is married to whom, that a person works for a specific company and so on. This problem can also be transformed into a classification problem and a machine learning model can be trained for every relationship type. Syntactic analysis (syntax) and semantic analysis (semantic) are the two primary techniques that lead to the understanding of natural language. NeuraSense Inc, a leading content streaming platform in 2023, has integrated advanced semantic analysis algorithms to provide highly personalized content recommendations to its users.

Compared to prestructuralist semantics, structuralism constitutes a move toward a more purely ‘linguistic’ type of lexical semantics, focusing on the linguistic system rather than the psychological background or the contextual flexibility of meaning. Cognitive lexical semantics emerged in the 1980s as part of cognitive linguistics, a loosely structured theoretical movement that opposed the autonomy of grammar and the marginal position of semantics in the generativist theory of language. The prototype-based conception of categorization originated in the mid-1970s with Rosch’s psycholinguistic research into the internal structure of categories (see, among others, Rosch, 1975).

ESA examines separate sets of documents and then attempts to extract meaning from the text based on the connections and similarities between the documents. The problem with ESA occurs if the documents submitted for analysis do not contain high-quality, structured information. Additionally, if the established parameters for analyzing the documents are unsuitable for the data, the results can be unreliable. Another logical language that captures many aspects of frames is CycL, the language used in the Cyc ontology and knowledge base.

Describing that selectional preference should be part of the semantic description of to comb. For a considerable period, these syntagmatic affinities received less attention than the paradigmatic relations, but in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea surfaced under different names. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage aims at defining cross-linguistically transparent definitions by means of those allegedly universal building-blocks. With its ability to process large amounts of data, NLP can inform manufacturers on how to improve production workflows, when to perform machine maintenance and what issues need to be fixed in products. And if companies need to find the best price for specific materials, natural language processing can review various websites and locate the optimal price.

What Is Semantic Analysis? Definition, Examples, and Applications in 2022 – Spiceworks News and Insights

What Is Semantic Analysis? Definition, Examples, and Applications in 2022.

Posted: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

You can proactively get ahead of NLP problems by improving machine language understanding. Translating a sentence isn’t just about replacing words from one language with another; it’s about preserving the original meaning and context. For instance, a direct word-to-word translation might result in grammatically correct sentences that sound unnatural or lose their original https://chat.openai.com/ intent. Semantic analysis ensures that translated content retains the nuances, cultural references, and overall meaning of the original text. The world became more eco-conscious, EcoGuard developed a tool that uses semantic analysis to sift through global news articles, blogs, and reports to gauge the public sentiment towards various environmental issues.

Of course, there is a total lack of uniformity across implementations, as it depends on how the software application has been defined. Figure 5.6 shows two possible procedural semantics for the query, “Find all customers with last name of Smith.”, one as a database query in the Structured Query Language (SQL), and one implemented as a user-defined function in Python. Third, semantic analysis might also consider what type of propositional attitude a sentence expresses, such as a statement, question, or request.

One extension of the field approach, then, consists of taking a syntagmatic point of view. Words may in fact have specific combinatorial features which it would be natural to include in a field analysis. A verb like to comb, for instance, selects direct objects that refer to hair, or hair-like things, or objects covered with hair.

Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Noun phrases are one or more words that contain a noun and maybe some descriptors, verbs or adverbs. Below is a parse tree for the sentence “The thief robbed the apartment.” Included is a description of the three different information types conveyed by the sentence. This technique is used separately or can be used along with one of the above methods to semantics analysis gain more valuable insights. Both polysemy and homonymy words have the same syntax or spelling but the main difference between them is that in polysemy, the meanings of the words are related but in homonymy, the meanings of the words are not related. In other words, we can say that polysemy has the same spelling but different and related meanings.

Natural language processing brings together linguistics and algorithmic models to analyze written and spoken human language. Based on the content, speaker sentiment and possible intentions, NLP generates an appropriate response. Insurance companies can assess claims with natural language processing since this technology can handle both structured and unstructured data.

Therefore, in semantic analysis with machine learning, computers use Word Sense Disambiguation to determine which meaning is correct in the given context. By understanding users’ search intent and delivering relevant content, organizations can optimize their SEO strategies to improve search engine result relevance. Semantic analysis helps identify search patterns, user preferences, and emerging trends, enabling companies to generate high-quality, targeted content that attracts more organic traffic to their websites.

This not only informs strategic decisions but also enables a more agile response to market trends and consumer needs. Moreover, QuestionPro typically provides visualization tools and reporting features to present survey data, including textual responses. These visualizations help identify trends or patterns within the unstructured text data, supporting the interpretation of semantic aspects to some extent. Semantic analysis offers your business many benefits when it comes to utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). Semantic analysis aims to offer the best digital experience possible when interacting with technology as if it were human. This includes organizing information and eliminating repetitive information, which provides you and your business with more time to form new ideas.

As we discussed, the most important task of semantic analysis is to find the proper meaning of the sentence. Therefore, the goal of semantic analysis is to draw exact meaning or dictionary meaning from the text. I hope after reading that article you can understand the power of NLP in Artificial Intelligence. So, in this part of this series, we will start our discussion on Semantic analysis, which is a level of the NLP tasks, and see all the important terminologies or concepts in this analysis. By leveraging this powerful technology, companies can gain valuable customer insights, enhance company performance, and optimize their SEO strategies.

Semantic analysis techniques involve extracting meaning from text through grammatical analysis and discerning connections between words in context. This proficiency goes beyond comprehension; it drives data analysis, guides customer feedback strategies, shapes customer-centric approaches, automates processes, and deciphers unstructured text. The following first presents an overview of the main phenomena studied in lexical semantics and then charts the different theoretical traditions that have contributed to the development of the field.

As we look towards the future, it’s evident that the growth of these disciplines will redefine how we interact with and leverage the vast quantities of data at our disposal. Continue reading this blog to learn more about semantic analysis and how it can work with examples. In-Text Classification, our aim is to label the text according to the insights we intend to gain from the textual data.

Syntactic analysis, also referred to as syntax analysis or parsing, is the process of analyzing natural language with the rules of a formal grammar. This degree of language understanding can help companies automate even the most complex language-intensive processes and, in doing so, transform the way they do business. Chat GPT So the question is, why settle for an educated guess when you can rely on actual knowledge? Expert.ai’s rule-based technology starts by reading all of the words within a piece of content to capture its real meaning. It then identifies the textual elements and assigns them to their logical and grammatical roles.

Every type of communication — be it a tweet, LinkedIn post, or review in the comments section of a website — may contain potentially relevant and even valuable information that companies must capture and understand to stay ahead of their competition. Capturing the information is the easy part but understanding what is being said (and doing this at scale) is a whole different story. It represents the relationship between a generic term and instances of that generic term. At the end of most chapters, there is a list of further readings and discussion or homework exercises.

semantics analysis

Word Sense Disambiguation involves interpreting the meaning of a word based upon the context of its occurrence in a text. The most recent projects based on SNePS include an implementation using the Lisp-like programming language, Clojure, known as CSNePS or Inference Graphs[39], [40]. Logic does not have a way of expressing the difference between statements and questions so logical frameworks for natural language sometimes add extra logical operators to describe the pragmatic force indicated by the syntax – such as ask, tell, or request. Logical notions of conjunction and quantification are also not always a good fit for natural language.

You will also need to label each piece of text so that the AI/NLP model knows how to interpret it correctly. Creating an AI-based semantic analyzer requires knowledge and understanding of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The first step in building an AI-based semantic analyzer is to identify the task that you want it to perform. Once you have identified the task, you can then build a custom model or find an existing open source solution that meets your needs.

Semantic analysis uses the context of the text to attribute the correct meaning to a word with several meanings. On the other hand, Sentiment analysis determines the subjective qualities of the text, such as feelings of positivity, negativity, or indifference. This information can help your business learn more about customers’ feedback and emotional experiences, which can assist you in making improvements to your product or service. Using machine learning with natural language processing enhances a machine’s ability to decipher what the text is trying to convey. This semantic analysis method usually takes advantage of machine learning models to help with the analysis. For example, once a machine learning model has been trained on a massive amount of information, it can use that knowledge to examine a new piece of written work and identify critical ideas and connections.

Finally, it analyzes the surrounding text and text structure to accurately determine the proper meaning of the words in context. As discussed in previous articles, NLP cannot decipher ambiguous words, which are words that can have more than one meaning in different contexts. Semantic analysis is key to contextualization that helps disambiguate language data so text-based NLP applications can be more accurate. This is a key concern for NLP practitioners responsible for the ROI and accuracy of their NLP programs.

Text summarization extracts words, phrases, and sentences to form a text summary that can be more easily consumed. The accuracy of the summary depends on a machine’s ability to understand language data. However, many organizations struggle to capitalize on it because of their inability to analyze unstructured data. This challenge is a frequent roadblock for artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that tackle language-intensive processes. This can be done by collecting text from various sources such as books, articles, and websites.

Mastering these can be transformative, nurturing an ecosystem where Significance of Semantic Insights becomes an empowering agent for innovation and strategic development. Every step taken in mastering semantic text analysis is a stride towards reshaping the way we engage with the overwhelming ocean of digital content—providing clarity and direction in a world once awash with undeciphered information. In today’s data-driven world, the ability to interpret complex textual information has become invaluable. Semantic Text Analysis presents a variety of practical applications that are reshaping industries and academic pursuits alike. From enhancing Business Intelligence to refining Semantic Search capabilities, the impact of this advanced interpretative approach is far-reaching and continues to grow. Ultimately, the burgeoning field of Semantic Technology continues to advance, bringing forward enhanced capabilities for professionals to harness.

semantics analysis

Companies are using it to gain insights into customer sentiment by analyzing online reviews or social media posts about their products or services. Furthermore, this same technology is being employed for predictive analytics purposes; companies can use data generated from past conversations with customers in order to anticipate future needs and provide better customer service experiences overall. It equips computers with the ability to understand and interpret human language in a structured and meaningful way. This comprehension is critical, as the subtleties and nuances of language can hold the key to profound insights within large datasets. It’s not just about understanding text; it’s about inferring intent, unraveling emotions, and enabling machines to interpret human communication with remarkable accuracy and depth. From optimizing data-driven strategies to refining automated processes, semantic analysis serves as the backbone, transforming how machines comprehend language and enhancing human-technology interactions.

Explore Semantic Relations in Corpora with Embedding Models – Towards Data Science

Explore Semantic Relations in Corpora with Embedding Models.

Posted: Fri, 24 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

To navigate these complexities, your understanding of the landscape of semantic analysis must include an appreciation for its nuances and an awareness of its limitations. Engaging with the ongoing progress in this discipline will better equip you to leverage semantic insights, mindful of their inherent subtleties and the advances still on the horizon. Understanding how to apply these techniques can significantly enhance your proficiency in data mining and the analysis of textual content.

Semantic analysis has become an increasingly important tool in the modern world, with a range of applications. From natural language processing (NLP) to automated customer service, semantic analysis can be used to enhance both efficiency and accuracy in understanding the meaning of language. Natural language processing (NLP) is a form of artificial intelligence that deals with understanding and manipulating human language.

semantics analysis

It is used in many different ways, such as voice recognition software, automated customer service agents, and machine translation systems. NLP algorithms are designed to analyze text or speech and produce meaningful output from it. Driven by the analysis, tools emerge as pivotal assets in crafting customer-centric strategies and automating processes.

NLP can also analyze customer surveys and feedback, allowing teams to gather timely intel on how customers feel about a brand and steps they can take to improve customer sentiment. With sentiment analysis we want to determine the attitude (i.e. the sentiment) of a speaker or writer with respect to a document, interaction or event. Therefore it is a natural language processing problem where text needs to be understood in order to predict the underlying intent.

If you use a text database about a particular subject that already contains established concepts and relationships, the semantic analysis algorithm can locate the related themes and ideas, understanding them in a fashion similar to that of a human. While, as humans, it is pretty simple for us to understand the meaning of textual information, it is not so in the case of machines. Thus, machines tend to represent the text in specific formats in order to interpret its meaning.

These Semantic Analysis Tools are not just technological marvels but partners in your analytical quests, assisting in transforming unstructured text into structured knowledge, one byte at a time. Embarking on Semantic Text Analysis requires robust Semantic Analysis Tools and resources, which are essential for professionals and enthusiasts alike to decipher the intricate patterns and meanings in text. The availability of various software applications, online platforms, and extensive libraries enables you to perform complex semantic operations with ease, allowing for a deep dive into the realm of Semantic Technology. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a technique that reads through text and identifies key elements, classifying them into predetermined categories such as person names, organizations, locations, and more.

In fact, the complexity of representing intensional contexts in logic is one of the reasons that researchers cite for using graph-based representations (which we consider later), as graphs can be partitioned to define different contexts explicitly. Figure 5.12 shows some example mappings used for compositional semantics and the lambda  reductions used to reach the final form. This notion of generalized onomasiological salience was first introduced in Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema (1994). By zooming in on the last type of factor, a further refinement of the notion of onomasiological salience is introduced, in the form the distinction between conceptual and formal onomasiological variation. The names jeans and trousers for denim leisure-wear trousers constitute an instance of conceptual variation, for they represent categories at different taxonomical levels. Jeans and denims, however, represent no more than different (but synonymous) names for the same denotational category.