Semantic analysis is the third phase in the process of natural language processing (NLP) compiler design, focusing on understanding the meaning and semantic coherence of a statement found within the text. It goes beyond simple syntax (grammatical structure) to uncover definitions of words and phrases and ensure the logical relationships between words are sound.

Core tasks that fall under semantic analysis include entity analysis, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Semantic analysis is typically performed by mapping the syntactic structure and checking for logic in the presented relationships between all entities, words, phrases, and sentences. Pre-trained APIs, such as Google Cloud NLP, are trained to perform a broad suite of semantic analysis tasks.