Traditional word representations like one-hot vectors are sparse and orthogonal, failing to capture semantic similarities.Distributed semantic representations(word embeddings) map words to dense, continuous vectors in a multi-dimensional space where similar words have similar vector representations. This approach enables better generalization and semantic reasoning in NLP tasks.

Exact Extract from HCIP-AI EI Developer V2.5:

"Distributed semantic representation maps words to dense real-valued vectors in continuous space, allowing semantic similarity to be captured in vector geometry."