Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a crucial role in numbers of biological processes and have received wide attention during the past years. Since the rapid development of high-throughput transcriptome sequencing technologies (RNA-seq) lead to a large amount of RNA data, it is urgent to develop a fast and accurate coding potential predictor. Many computational methods have been proposed to address this issue, they usually exploit information on open reading frame (ORF), protein sequence,k-mer, evolutionary signatures, or homology. Despite the effectiveness of these approaches, there is still much room to improve. Indeed, none of these methods exploit the contextual information of RNA sequence, for example,k-mer features that counts the occurrence frequencies of continuous nucleotides (k-mer) in the whole RNA sequence cannot reflect local contextual information of eachk-mer. In view of this shortcoming, here, we present a novel alignment-free method, CPPVec, which exploits the contextual information of RNA sequence for coding potential prediction for the first time, it can be easily implemented by distributed representation (e.g., doc2vec) of protein sequence translated from the longest ORF. The experimental findings demonstrate that CPPVec is an accurate coding potential predictor and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12864-023-09365-7.