Contextual correlates of synonymy
Herbert Rubenstein, John Bannister Goodenough · Communications of the ACM · 1965
Experimentol corroboration was obtained for the hypothesis that the proportion of words common to the contexts of word A and to the contexts of word B is a function of the degree to which A and B are similar in meaning.The tests were carried out for variously defined contexts.The shapes of the functions, however, indicate that similarity of context is reliable as criterion only for detecting pairs of words that are very similar in meaning.