There’s a lot of buzz about keywords and their semantic relatedness recently so I thought I’d volunteer 10 good papers, freely available via citeseer 
to widen or extend the conversation. The list is obviously by no means exhaustive.
Non-computer scientists, don’t be afraid of the big complicated equations and stuff, if you get the gist of it that’s perfectly cool – you can pick these up with practice, and remember, it’s not rocket science, it’s computer science 
Here they are:
Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography – Church, Hanks – 1989
– Church, Hanks – 1989Evaluation techniques for automatic semantic extraction: Comparing syntactic and window-based approaches – Grefenstette – 1993
– Grefenstette – 1993A WordNet based rule generalization engine for meaning extraction by Joyce Yue Chai, Alan W. Biermann — 1997 — Tenth International Symposium On Methodologies For Intelligent Systems
by Joyce Yue Chai, Alan W. Biermann — 1997 — Tenth International Symposium On Methodologies For Intelligent SystemsFinding Semantically Related Words in Large corpora by Fi Mu, Pavel Smrž, Pavel Rychlý
by Fi Mu, Pavel Smrž, Pavel Rychlý Syntactic contexts for finding semantically related words by Lonneke Van Der Plas, Gosse Bouma — In CLIN
by Lonneke Van Der Plas, Gosse Bouma — In CLIN Making senses: Bootstrapping sense-tagged lists of semantically related words by Nancy Ide — 2006 — Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Lecture notes in Computer Science 3878
by Nancy Ide — 2006 — Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Lecture notes in Computer Science 3878Mapping syntactic dependencies onto semantic relations by Pablo Gamallo, Marco Gonzalez, Alexandre Agustini, Gabriel Lopes, Vera S. De Lima — 2002 — ECAI Workshop on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Ontology Engineering
by Pablo Gamallo, Marco Gonzalez, Alexandre Agustini, Gabriel Lopes, Vera S. De Lima — 2002 — ECAI Workshop on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Ontology EngineeringContextual word similarity and estimation from sparse data (1993) by Ido Dagan In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(1993) by Ido Dagan In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational LinguisticsPutting Pieces Together: Combining FrameNet, VerbNet and WordNet for Robust Semantic Parsing (2005) by L Shi, R Mihalcea in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics
(2005) by L Shi, R Mihalcea in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational LinguisticsExploring the Potential of Semantic Relatedness in Information Retrieval (2006) by Christ of Müller, Iryna Gurevych, In Proc. of LWA 2006 Lernen – Wissensentdeckung – Adaptivität: Information Retrieval
(2006) by Christ of Müller, Iryna Gurevych, In Proc. of LWA 2006 Lernen – Wissensentdeckung – Adaptivität: Information Retrieval
