The first stage (lines 4 − 9) consists, first, in retrieving a candidate set by means of the function relSim, which computes the similarity of the relation between b φ ι and ς φ ι to the relation between b ι and a hidden word x. relSim can be thus interpreted as satisfying the well-known analogy "a is to b what c is to x", exploiting the vector space representation 4 of a, b, and c to discover x (Zhila et al., 2013).
we compute v b −v a +v c in order to obtain the set of vectors closest to v x by cosine distance.