  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.
