  There have been several efforts to extend distributional semantics beyond
individual words, to measure the similarity of word pairs, phrases, and
sentences (briefly, tuples; ordered sets of words, contiguous or
noncontiguous). One way to extend beyond words is to compare two tuples using a
function that combines pairwise similarities between the component words in the
tuples. A strength of this approach is that it works with both relational
similarity (analogy) and compositional similarity (paraphrase). However, past
work required hand-coding the combination function for different tasks. The
main contribution of this paper is that combination functions are generated by
supervised learning. We achieve state-of-the-art results in measuring
relational similarity between word pairs (SAT analogies and SemEval~2012 Task
2) and measuring compositional similarity between noun-modifier phrases and
unigrams (multiple-choice paraphrase questions).
