1. A computer-implemented method for building an association tensor to facilitate document and word-level processing operations, the method comprising: receiving, at a computer, a collection of reference documents containing textual information; building, at the computer, the association tensor representing pair-wise similarities corresponding to a co-occurrence of term pairs in the collection of reference documents; computing a lower-dimensional vector-space representation of terms that preserves the pair-wise similarities in the association tensor based on a singular value decomposition of the association tensor; deriving a lower-dimensional vector-space representation of a document based on a weighted linear combination of computed term vectors in the lower-dimensional vector-space representation of the terms in the collection of reference documents; and performing semantic analysis upon the collection of reference documents using the lower-dimensional vector-space representation of the document.