Let's begin by introducing some basic principles of word meaning. How should we represent the meaning of a word? In the n-gram models of Chapter 3, and in classical NLP applications, our only representation of a word is as a string of letters, or an index in a vocabulary list. This representation is not that different from a tradition in philosophy, perhaps you've seen it in introductory logic classes, in which the meaning of words is represented by just spelling the word with small capital letters; representing the meaning of "dog" as DOG, and "cat" as CAT.