To improve motion graph based motion synthesis,semantic control was introduced.Hybrid motion features including both numerical and user-defined semantic relational features were extracted to encode the characteristic aspects contained in the character's poses of the given motion sequences.Motion templates were then automatically derived from the training motions for capturing the spatio-temporal characteristics of an entire given class of semantically related motions.The data streams of motion documents were automatically annotated with semantic motion class labels by matching their respective motion class templates.Finally,the semantic control was introduced into motion graph based human motion synthesis.Experiments of motion synthesis demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach which enables users higher level of semantically intuitive control and high quality in human motion synthesis from motion capture database.