'Lenci and Sahlgren's textbook is a landmark contribution to the fast growing and increasingly important discipline of distributional semantics. They have managed to distill 60 years of diverse research on distributional semantics, from its beginning in structural and corpus linguistics and psychology, through the application of techniques from information retrieval and linear algebra, to the most recent developments driven by deep neural networks and large language models in NLP. The authors synthesize the major findings from different fields and integrate these diverse traditions into a comprehensive and coherent framework of distributional meaning. Lenci and Sahlgren's text promises to be the new standard for reference and teaching in this area.' James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University
Preface; Part I. Theory: 1. From usage to meaning: the foundations of distributional semantics; 2. Distributional representations; Part II. Models: 3. Distributional semantic models; 4. Matrix models; 5. Random encoding models; Part III. Practice: 7. Evaluation of distributional semantic models; 8. Distributional semantics and the lexicon; 9 Distributional semantics beyond the lexicon; 10. Conclusions and Outlook; References; Index.