While similarity of denotation might be inferred from similarity of distributional or co-occurrence behavior (Dagan 2000;Weeds 2003), the two are distinct ideas.
a number of researchers, such as Dagan (2000), have promoted the hypothesis that distributional similarity can act as a useful proxy for semantic relatedness in many applications because it is based on corpus-derived data rather than manually created lexical resources; indeed, it could perhaps be used to automatically create (first-draft) lexical resources (Grefenstette 1994).