# SemParser: A Semantic Parser for Log Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.12636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12636/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Interpretable Online Log Analysis Using Large Language Models with Prompt Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07610/) (2023)
- [Automatic Programming: Large Language Models and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02213/) (2024)
- [Face It Yourselves: An LLM-Based Two-Stage Strategy to Localize Configuration Errors via Logs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00640/) (2024)
- [Log Parsing: How Far Can ChatGPT Go?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01590/) (2023)
- [LogLM: From Task-based to Instruction-based Automated Log Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09352/) (2024)
- [Adapting Large Language Models to Log Analysis with Interpretable Domain Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01377/) (2024)
- [Log Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models via Knowledge-Enriched Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11997/) (2025)
- [Twin Graph-based Anomaly Detection via Attentive Multi-Modal Learning for Microservice System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04701/) (2023)
- [Demystifying and Extracting Fault-indicating Information from Logs for Failure Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13561/) (2024)
- [Log Parsing using LLMs with Self-Generated In-Context Learning and Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03376/) (2024)
- [Root Cause Localization for Microservice Systems in Cloud-edge Collaborative Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13604/) (2024)
- [Interactive Log Parsing via Light-weight User Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12225/) (2023)
- [A Word is Worth 4-bit: Efficient Log Parsing with Binary Coded Decimal Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01147/) (2025)
- [MicLog: Towards Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Log Parsing via Progressive Meta In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07005/) (2026)
- [SCOPE: Tree-based Self-Correcting Online Log Parsing via Syntactic-Semantic Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27247/) (2026)
- [Protocol-Sensitive Evaluation of Log Anomaly Detection: Component Costs and Target-Access Sensitivity on HDFS and BGL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05807/) (2026)
- [SLS-Bench: A Benchmark for Incident Log Summarization with Synthetic Observability Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16412/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Logs, being run-time information automatically generated by software, record system events and activities with their timestamps. Before obtaining more insights into the run-time status of the software, a fundamental step of log analysis, called log parsing, is employed to extract structured templates and parameters from the semi-structured raw log messages. However, current log parsers are all syntax-based and regard each message as a character string, ignoring the semantic information included in parameters and templates. Thus, we propose the semantic-based parser SemParser to unlock the critical bottleneck of mining semantics from log messages. It contains two steps, an end-to-end semantic miner and a joint parser. Specifically, the first step aims to identify explicit semantics inside a single log, and the second step is responsible for jointly inferring implicit semantics and computing structural outputs based on the contextual knowledge base. To analyze the effectiveness of our semantic parser, we first demonstrate that it can derive rich semantics from log messages collected from six widely-applied systems with an average F1 score of 0.985. Then, we conduct two representative downstream tasks, showing that current downstream models improve their performance with appropriately extracted semantics by 1.2%-11.7% and 8.65% on two anomaly detection datasets and a failure identification dataset, respectively. We believe these findings provide insights into semantically understanding log messages for the log analysis community.