We introduce an alternative approach to extracting word pair associations from corpora, based purely on surface distances in the text. We contrast it with the prevailing windowbased co-occurrence model and show it to be more statistically robust and to disclose a broader selection of significant associative relationships - owing largely to the property of scale-independence. In the process we provide insights into the limiting characteristics of window-based methods which complement the sometimes conflicting application-oriented literature in this area. .
