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.
The term "statistical semantics" was first used in the context of machine translation, where Warren Weaver proposed using co-occurrence frequency of surrounding words near a target word to disambiguate word sense. This concept aligns with J.R. Firth's idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps."