Distributional Models of Word Meaning

Abstract

Distributional semantics is a usage-based model of meaning, based on the assumption that the statistical distribution of linguistic items in context plays a key role in characterizing their semantic behavior. Distributional models build semantic representations by extracting co-occurrences from corpora and have become a mainstream research paradigm in computational linguistics. In this review, I present the state of the art in distributional semantics, focusing on its assets and limits as a model of meaning and as a method for semantic analysis.