Distributed representations attempt to capture the meaning of a word by considering its relations with other words in its context. The idea is captured in this quote from J. R. Firth (for more information refer to the article: Document Embedding with Paragraph Vectors, by Andrew M. Dai, Christopher Olah, and Quoc V. Le, arXiv:1507.07998, 2015), a linguist who first proposed this idea:
Consider the following pair of sentences:
Paris is the capital of France.
Berlin is the capital of Germany.
Even assuming you have no knowledge of world geography (or English for that matter), you would still conclude without too much effort that the word pairs (Paris, Berlin) and (France, Germany) were related in some way, and that corresponding words in each pair were related in the same way to each other, that is:
Paris : France :: Berlin : Germany...
