Distributional semantics

Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called Distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings. Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called Distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings. The distributional hypothesis in linguistics is derived from the semantic theory of language usage, i.e. words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to purport similar meanings. The underlying idea that 'a word is characterized by the company it keeps' was popularized by Firth. The distributional hypothesis is the basis for statistical semantics. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in linguistics, it is now receiving attention in cognitive science especially regarding the context of word use. In recent years, the distributional hypothesis has provided the basis for the theory of similarity-based generalization in language learning: the idea that children can figure out how to use words they've rarely encountered before by generalizing about their use from distributions of similar words.