In its broadest sense, statistical semantics is concerned with semantic properties of words, phrases, sentences, and texts, engendered by their distributional characteristics in large text corpora. For example, terms such as cheerful, exuberant, and depressed may be considered semantically similar to the extent that they tend to occur flanked by the same (or in turn similar) nearby words. (For some purposes, such as information retrieval, identifying labels of documents may be used as occurrence