The vast majority of contemporary research that investigates statistical properties of language deals with characterizing words by extracting information about their behavior from large corpora.
co-occurrence of words in n-word windows, syntactic structures, sentences, paragraphs, and even whole documents is captured in vector-space models built from text corpora (Turney and Pantel, 2010;Basili and Pennacchiotti, 2010;Erk and Padó, 2008;Mitchell and Lapata, 2008;Bullinaria and Levy, 2007;Jones and Mewhort, 2007;Pado and Lapata, 2007;Lin, 1998;Landauer and Dumais, 1997;Lund and Burgess, 1996;Salton et al., 1975).