HARRIS, FIRTH, AND DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTICS

The direct influence of Zellig Harris and John R. Firth on present-day distributional corpus semantics is so limited that attributing a direct foundational role to them (as is often done in distributional semantic papers) is somewhat misleading. Conversely, they did have a considerable indirect influence, which is specifically important in the case of Firth: a line of development can be drawn from Firth's notion of collocation to Sinclair's Cobuild Dictionary of Contemporary English, and from there to the formulation of the Point-wise Mutual Information measure of collocational strength and the emergence of probabilistic Natural Language Processing.