As Ziph's law states that most of the words in vocabulary rarely occur in the corpus (Powers, 1998) these methods have some limitation for word pairs who do not co-occur in a context.
according to the distributional hypothesis which states "words that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings" (Harris, 1954), distributional approaches try to recognize the relation between words based on their separate occurrence in the corpus which can be represented for example by their word embedding vectors (Mikolov et al.,2013) and these methods have shown great performance (Baroni et al., 2012;Turney and Pantel, 2010;Roller et al., 2014).