In distributional semantics, words are represented by context features, usually co-occurrence numbers between words or the pointwise mutual information between each word and each context word.
it turns out that words with a similar meaning have similar vectors of context features; semantically similar words occur in similar contexts (Rubenstein and Goodenough, 1965;Saif and Hirst, 2012;Bullinaria and Levy, 2007;Turney and Pantel, 2010;Bullinaria and Levy, 2012;Kiela and Clark, 2014).