A comparison was made of vectors derived by using ordinary co-occurrence
statistics from large text corpora and of vectors derived by measuring the
inter-word distances in dictionary definitions. The precision of word sense
disambiguation by using co-occurrence vectors from the 1987 Wall Street Journal
(20M total words) was higher than that by using distance vectors from the
Collins English Dictionary (60K head words + 1.6M definition words). However,
other experimental results suggest that distance vectors contain some different
semantic information from co-occurrence vectors.Comment: 6 pages, appeared in the Proc. of COLING94 (pp. 304-309)