Synonym. In the figurative sense, two words are sometimes said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation: ...a widespread impression that ...
Hollywood was synonymous with immorality...[2] Polysemy. Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins’ definition stipulates three elements: (i) the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, (ii) the links between these senses form a network, and (iii) understanding the ‘inner’ one contributes to understanding of the ‘outer’ one.[3] Polysemy is a pivotal concept within disciplines such as media studies and linguistics.
Polysemes[edit] Latent semantic analysis. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms.
LSA assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur in similar pieces of text. A matrix containing word counts per paragraph (rows represent unique words and columns represent each paragraph) is constructed from a large piece of text and a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to reduce the number of columns while preserving the similarity structure among rows.
Words are then compared by taking the cosine of the angle between the two vectors formed by any two rows. Values close to 1 represent very similar words while values close to 0 represent very dissimilar words.[1] Overview[edit] Polysemy and synonymy.