History

The term Statistical Semantics was first used by Weaver (1955) in his well-known paper on machine translation. He argued that word sense disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence frequency of the context words near a given target word. The underlying assumption that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was advocated by J.R. Firth (1957). This assumption is known in Linguistics as the Distributional Hypothesis. Delavenay (1960) defined Statistical Semantics as "Statistical study of meanings of words and their frequency and order of recurrence." Furnas et al. (1983) is frequently cited as a foundational contribution to Statistical Semantics. An early success in the field was Latent Semantic Analysis.