Methods and computer-readable media for associating words or groups of words distilled from content, such as reported speech or an attitude report, of a document to form semantic relationships collectively used to generate a semantic representation of the content are provided. Semantic representations may include elements identified or parsed from a text portion of the content, the elements of which may be associated with other elements that share a semantic relationship, such as an agent, location, or topic relationship. Relationships may also be developed by associating one element that is in relation to, or is about, another element, thereby allowing for rapid and effective comparison of associations found in a semantic representation with associations derived from queries. The semantic relationships may be determined based on semantic information, such as potential meanings and grammatical functions of each element within the text portion of the content.