Semantic decomposition (natural language processing)

Semantic decomposition is a fancy way of saying that we can break down words and sentences in a way that helps computers understand what they mean. Imagine you had a toy car that you wanted to take apart to see how it works. Semantic decomposition is kind of like taking apart words and sentences to see how they work.

Let's start with a simple sentence like "The cat is on the mat." First, we can break it down into individual words: "The," "cat," "is," "on," and "the," and "mat." Then we can figure out what each word means. For example, "cat" refers to a furry animal with four legs, and "mat" refers to a piece of material you might use to wipe your feet on.

Next, we need to figure out how the words fit together to make a coherent sentence. In this case, we know that "cat" and "mat" are objects, and "is on" tells us the relationship between them. So we can conclude that the sentence means that the cat is sitting on the mat.

Semantic decomposition gets more complicated when the sentences get more complex. But by breaking them down into individual words and understanding how they fit together, we can teach computers to understand natural language like humans do.