  In this paper, we claim that Vector Cosine, which is generally considered one
of the most efficient unsupervised measures for identifying word similarity in
Vector Space Models, can be outperformed by a completely unsupervised measure
that evaluates the extent of the intersection among the most associated
contexts of two target words, weighting such intersection according to the rank
of the shared contexts in the dependency ranked lists. This claim comes from
the hypothesis that similar words do not simply occur in similar contexts, but
they share a larger portion of their most relevant contexts compared to other
related words. To prove it, we describe and evaluate APSyn, a variant of
Average Precision that, independently of the adopted parameters, outperforms
the Vector Cosine and the co-occurrence on the ESL and TOEFL test sets. In the
best setting, APSyn reaches 0.73 accuracy on the ESL dataset and 0.70 accuracy
in the TOEFL dataset, beating therefore the non-English US college applicants
(whose average, as reported in the literature, is 64.50%) and several
state-of-the-art approaches.
