This is fairly readable (high-level) post on word embeddings: http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-07-NLP-RNNs-Representation...

And this is one that explains everything OP needs to understand the confusing sentence from their intro:

http://mccormickml.com/2016/04/19/word2vec-tutorial-the-skip...

Thanks :) I feel like some key concepts are a bit beyond my reach, but that they are such a small quantity that it can be a good starting point for googling around. Thank for your help!

Great read, thanks!

I know understand what word vectors are and how they are useful (which, btw, allows me to make way more sense of the output of the program in this HN post :D ), plus more generalities about the field.

Anyone in the same position than me (wanting to learn the basics) should read this.

While dense and not necessarily for the mathematically faint of heart, I've learned a ton about NLP and ANNs through http://cs224d.stanford.edu/.

It's quite an investment of time, but this is a good answer to "do we have to do academic studies to learn this stuff?"

=> Maybe, but nowadays you don't have to quit your job and move close to an university to learn, you can just have online courses.

Thanks :)