What is Latent Semantic Analysis and how relevant is it to search engine optimization?

3 Comments

1. tbruckhaus says:

   March 7, 2010 at 2:24 pm

   I personally think that LSA may be a key technology to improving the ability of current search technology to "understand" and answer questions asked in natural language.

   Here is information on LSA from Wikipedia:

   Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, invented in 1990 [1] by Scott Deerwester, Susan Dumais, George Furnas, Thomas Landauer, and Richard Harshman. In the context of its application to information retrieval, it is sometimes called latent semantic indexing (LSI).

   LSA uses a term-document matrix which describes the occurrences of terms in documents; it is a sparse matrix whose rows correspond to documents and whose columns correspond to terms, typically stemmed words that appear in the documents. A typical example of the weighting of the elements of the matrix is tf-idf: the element of the matrix proportional to the number of times the terms appear in each document, where rare terms are upweighted to reflect their relative importance.

   This matrix is common to standard semantic models as well (though it is not necessarily explicitly expressed as a matrix, since the mathematical properties of matrix are not always used).
2. dkarunamadhu says:

   March 7, 2010 at 2:24 pm

   I am not aware of this
   but i am sure that the below link will help you

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
3. sweet-cookie says:

   March 7, 2010 at 2:24 pm

   it is 10. 20 pm on a Saturday night ! and you ask me that ???

   Well its hot as hell in here and i am going off to take a nice cool shower now .

   sorry i am not, going to wrap my pretty little head

   around semantics tonight , for you or anyone
   LOL