Representing the meaning of a word by capitalizing it is a pretty unsatisfactory model. You might have seen a joke due originally to semanticist Barbara Partee (Carlson, 1977) : Q: What's the meaning of life? A: LIFE' Surely we can do better than this! After all, we'll want a model of word meaning to do all sorts of things for us. It should tell us that some words have similar meanings (cat is similar to dog), others are antonyms (cold is the opposite of hot), some have positive connotations (happy) while others have negative connotations (sad). It should represent the fact that the meanings of buy, sell, and pay offer differing perspectives on the same underlying purchasing event (If I buy something from you, you've probably sold it to me, and I likely paid you). More generally, a model of word meaning should allow us to draw inferences to address meaning-related tasks like question-answering or dialogue.