1. A computer-implemented method for developing semantic relationships between elements distilled from content of a document to generate a semantic representation of the content, the method comprising: identifying, by way of a computing device having a processor and memory, a text portion of the document; determining semantic information for a plurality of elements identified in the text portion, the semantic information including one or more of meanings of the identified elements or grammatical functions of the identified elements; identifying at least one of the identified elements as a subject of the text portion; determining a plurality of levels of association from the text portion and identifying at least one of the identified elements as a reporting act corresponding to an attitude report for each of the plurality of levels of association, the reporting act identified based on a set of rules that utilizes, in part, surrounding text, wherein the attitude report describes the subject's attitude toward a particular topic of the text portion; based on the determined semantic information for the identified elements, associating the identified elements so that each association of identified elements represents a certain semantic relationship; generating, by way of the computing device, a semantic representation that represents the associations, by way of relational elements that describe the associations, of the identified elements to one another; and indexing the semantic representation, including the identified elements and the relational elements, in an index for retrieval, the index being searchable and including pointers from the semantic representation to its associated text portion.