Latent Semantic Index (LSI)

1) here is a great explaination to a layman.

or latent semantic analysis

"The term ’semantics’ is applied to the science and study of meaning in language, and the meaning of characters, character strings and words. Not just the language and words themselves, but the true meaning being conveyed in the context in which they are being used.

In 2002 a company called Applied Semantics, an innovator in the use of semantics in text processing, launched a program known as AdSense, which was a form of contextual advertising whereby adverts were placed on website pages which contained text that was relevant to the subject of the adverts.

The matching up of text and adverts was carried out by software in the form of mathematical formulae known as algorithms. It was claimed that these formulae used semantics to analyze the meaning of the text within the web page. In fact, what it initially seemed to do was to match keywords within the page with keywords used in the adverts, though some further interpretation of meaning was evident in the way that some relevant adverts were correctly placed without containing the same keyword character string as used on the web page.

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2)from Patterns in Unstructured Data -Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization