ABSTRACT
Semantic networks (SNs), widely used in artificial intelligence for knowledge representation and natural language processing, are an appealing solution for social scientists working on textual data. Along with the representation of factual statements, they allow the representation of attitude reports like beliefs and states of knowledge of social actors. They also offer the possibility of representing abstract statements like theoretical assertions and more generally, ideas. In addition, semantic networks couple these expressive abilities with an inferential retrieval of the coded content.
