# Retrieving Multi-Entity Associations: An Evaluation of Combination Modes for Word Embeddings

## TL;DR

This paper evaluates how different combination modes of word embeddings can be used to retrieve multi-entity associations in news data, comparing their effectiveness to traditional co-occurrence networks.

## Contribution

It introduces an evaluation of combination modes for embeddings in multi-entity retrieval tasks, highlighting their strengths and limitations compared to co-occurrence networks.

## Key findings

- Embedding methods model different relation types.
- Combination modes improve multi-entity retrieval.
- Performance lags behind co-occurrence networks for rare entities.

## Abstract

Word embeddings have gained significant attention as learnable representations of semantic relations between words, and have been shown to improve upon the results of traditional word representations. However, little effort has been devoted to using embeddings for the retrieval of entity associations beyond pairwise relations. In this paper, we use popular embedding methods to train vector representations of an entity-annotated news corpus, and evaluate their performance for the task of predicting entity participation in news events versus a traditional word cooccurrence network as a baseline. To support queries for events with multiple participating entities, we test a number of combination modes for the embedding vectors. While we find that even the best combination modes for word embeddings do not quite reach the performance of the full cooccurrence network, especially for rare entities, we observe that different embedding methods model different types of relations, thereby indicating the potential for ensemble methods.