the context-dependent nature of meaning with his notion of 'context of situation', and his work on collocational meaning is widely acknowledged in the field of distributional semantics. In particular, he is known for the famous quotation: You shall know a word by the company it keeps (Firth, J. R. 1957:11) Firth developed a particular view of linguistics that has given rise to the adjective 'Firthian'. Central to this view is the idea of polysystematism. David Crystal describes this as: an approach to linguistic analysis based on the view that language patterns cannot be accounted for in terms of a single system of analytic principles and categories ... but that different systems may need to be set up at different places within a given level of description. His approach can be considered as resuming that of Malinowski's anthropological semantics, and as a precursor of the approach of semiotic anthropology. Anthropological approaches to semantics are alternative to the three major types of semantics approaches: linguistic semantics, logical semantics, and General semantics. Other independent approaches to semantics are philosophical semantics and psychological semantics. His theory that "you shall know a word by the company it keeps" / "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" inspired works on word embedding hence add a major impact in natural language processing. Many techniques where designed to build dense vectors representing words semantics based on their neighbors (e.g. Word2vec, GloVe). The 'London School' As a teacher in the University of London for more than 20 years, Firth influenced a generation of British linguists. The popularity of his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was known as the 'London School' of linguistics. Among Firth's students, the so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified by Michael Halliday, who was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London from 1965 until 1971. Firth encouraged a number of his students, who later became well known linguists, to carry out research on a number of African and Oriental languages. T. F. Mitchell worked on Arabic and Berber, Frank R. Palmer on Ethiopian languages, including Tigre, and Michael Halliday on Chinese. Some other students whose native tongues were not English also worked with him and that enriched Firth's theory on prosodic analysis. Among his influential students were Masud Husain Khan and the Arab linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir . Firth got many insights from work done by his students