UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS)
From the homepage:
The UCREL semantic analysis system is a framework for undertaking the automatic semantic analysis of text. The framework has been designed and used across a number of research projects and this page collects together various pointers to those projects and publications produced since 1990.
The semantic tagset used by USAS was originally loosely based on Tom McArthur’s Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur, 1981). It has a multi-tier structure with 21 major discourse fields (shown here on the right), subdivided, and with the possibility of further fine-grained subdivision in certain cases. We have written an introduction to the USAS category system (PDF file) with examples of prototypical words and multi-word units in each semantic field.
There are four online taggers available:
English: 100,000 word limit
Italian: 2,000 word limit
Dutch: 2,000 word limit
Chinese: 3,000 character limit
Enjoy!
I first saw this in a tweet by Paul Rayson.