1. A method for building an association tensor to facilitate document and word-level processing operations, comprising: receiving a collection of documents containing textual information; using terms from the collection of documents to build the association tensor, which contains values representing pair-wise similarities between terms in the collection of documents; and wherein if a given value for a pair-wise similarity is calculated based on an insufficient number of samples, the method further comprises, determining a corresponding value for the pair-wise similarity from a reference document collection, and substituting the corresponding value for the given value into the association tensor.