Our intuition is that given an initial term, terms that are close to terms that are close to the initial term or beyond, may have also some relation with the initial term, and the strength of this relation decreases as the shortest path length increases.
although the proposed kernel does not incorporate any knowledge of the language being used, it does capture some statistical information and is thus capable of outperforming metrics based on the unigram and even n-gram vector-space model.