Semantic relations in information science

This chapter examines the nature of semantic relations and their main applications in information science. The nature and types of semantic relations are discussed from the perspectives of linguistics and psychology. An overview of the semantic relations used in knowledge structures such as thesauri and ontologies are provided, as well as the main techniques used in the automatic extraction of semantic relations from text. The chapter then reviews the use of semantic relations in information extraction, information retrieval, question-answering and automatic text summarization applications.