Turney and Pantel’s paper is a very good overview of how word meaning can be captured by contextualized index term occurrence and co-occurrence frequencies. At the same time, being a review article, it is also technical and requires a level of technical understanding and the ability to generalize.

Turney, P.D., Pantel, P. 2010. From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (37), 141-188.