The first of these approaches is taken by Curran and Moens (2002), who evaluate a number of different distributional similarity measures and weight functions against a gold standard thesaurus compiled from Roget's, the Macquarie thesaurus, and the Moby thesaurus.
we argue that this approach can only be considered when distributional similarity is required as an approximation to semantic similarity and that, in any case, it is not ideal since it is not clear that there is a single "right answer" as to which words are most distributionally similar.