  We propose and study a novel supervised approach to learning statistical
semantic relatedness models from subjectively annotated training examples. The
proposed semantic model consists of parameterized co-occurrence statistics
associated with textual units of a large background knowledge corpus. We
present an efficient algorithm for learning such semantic models from a
training sample of relatedness preferences. Our method is corpus independent
and can essentially rely on any sufficiently large (unstructured) collection of
coherent texts. Moreover, the approach facilitates the fitting of semantic
models for specific users or groups of users. We present the results of
extensive range of experiments from small to large scale, indicating that the
proposed method is effective and competitive with the state-of-the-art.
