The term statistical semantics was first used by Warren Weaver in his well-known paper on machine translation. He argued that word sense disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence frequency of the context words near a given target word. The underlying assumption that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was advocated by J.R. Firth.
Warren Weaver introduced the term "statistical semantics" in his paper on machine translation, proposing that word sense disambiguation for machines should be based on the frequency of surrounding words near a target word. This idea, which emphasizes the importance of context, echoes the work of J.R. Firth who argued that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps."