Distributional Semantics

'Lenci and Sahlgren's textbook is a landmark contribution to the fast growing and increasingly important discipline of distributional semantics. They have managed to distill 60 years of diverse research on distributional semantics, from its beginning in structural and corpus linguistics and psychology, through the application of techniques from information retrieval and linear algebra, to the most recent developments driven by deep neural networks and large language models in NLP. The authors synthesize the major findings from different fields and integrate these diverse traditions into a comprehensive and coherent framework of distributional meaning. Lenci and Sahlgren's text promises to be the new standard for reference and teaching in this area.' James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University

'It is a significant contribution to both linguistic theory and computational linguistics in its own right, providing a bridge between semantic theories and practical applications in natural language processing (NLP). As both a linguist and computational linguist, I found this book relevant to current computational as well as formal semantic research, which increasingly employs distributional methods to understand and model language meaning … Lenci and Sahlgren's book is important, as it presents an impressive treatment of the historical and theoretical foundations of distributional semantics … By providing a clear and rigorous account of how meaning can be modeled through usage patterns, Lenci and Sahlgren contribute to ongoing debates in semantics and cognitive science dating back 70 years. Their book supports the view that meaning in language can be understood through its distributional properties, which can in turn help linguists better understand the formal properties inherent in language meaning.' James Pustejovsky, WORD