Distributional semantics favor the use of linear algebra as computational tool and representational framework. The basic approach is to collect distributional information in high-dimensional vectors, and to define distributional/semantic similarity in terms of vector similarity. Different kinds of similarities can be extracted depending on which type of distributional information is used to collect the vectors: topical similarities can be extracted by populating the vectors with information on which text regions the linguistic items occur in; paradigmatic similarities can be extracted by populating the vectors with information on which other linguistic items the items co-occur with. Note that the latter type of vectors can also be used to extract syntagmatic similarities by looking at the individual vector components.