Exploring Distributional Semantics with the SpaceXplorer Tool

Distributional studies quantify the similarity of words by collecting word co-occurrence frequency information from large text corpora. According to the distributional hypothesis, this similarity is a semantic phenomenon. This paper aims to introduce the basics of Distributional Semantics and a new tool, spaceXplorer, which facilitates distributional investigations by collecting co-occurrence information from a Wikipedia snapshot (with or without using linguistic annotation) and displays word similarity information through a convenient, interactive user interface.