Similarity defined as association, i.e., the mental activation of a term when another is presented (Chiarello et al., 1990; Lemaire and Denhiere, 2006), e.g., knife-murder, has been estimated in terms of frequency of co-occurrence of words in language (and the physical world) (Turney, 2001; Turney and Pantel, 2010; McRae et al., 2012; Bruni et al., 2012).
to associative relatedness, a concept of semantic similarity defined in terms of shared superordinate category (Lupker, 1984; Resnik, 1995) (taxonomical similarity (Turney and Pantel, 2010)) or shared semantic features (Tversky, 1977; Frenck-Mestre and Bueno, 1999; Turney, 2006) has been proposed.