What is the difference between syntactic analogy and semantic analogy?

Question

At 15:10 of this video about fastText it mentions syntactic analogy and semantic analogy. But I am not sure what the difference is between them.

Could anybody help explain the difference with examples?

Answer 1

Syntactic means syntax, as in tasks that have to do with the structure of the sentence, these include tree parsing, POS tagging, usually they need less context and a shallower understanding of world knowledge

Semantic tasks mean meaning related, a higher level of the language tree, these also typically involve a higher level understanding of the text and might involve tasks s.a. question answering, sentiment analysis, etc...

As for analogies, he is referring to the mathematical operator like properties exhibited by word embedding, in this context a syntactic analogy would be related to plurals, tense or gender, those sort of things, and semantic analogy would be word meaning relationships s.a. man + queen = king, etc... See for instance this article (and many others)