Distributional similarity provides a technique for obtaining semantically related words from corpus data using automated methods that compare the contexts in which the words appear. Such methods can be useful for producing thesauruses, with application to work in lexicography and computational linguistics. However, the most similar words produced using these methods are not always near synonyms...

In this paper we describe our approach to the Ad Hoc Retrieval task of the TREC 2004 Genomics Track. This is a conventional searching task based on a 10-year subset of MEDLINE (about 4.5 million documents and 9 gigabytes in size) and 50 topics derived from information needs obtained via interviews of real biomedical researchers. We will also discuss the results of our submitted runs. The hypoth...