[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-vectors [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21509

This one sounds promising to me, thanks for the suggestion. We technical writers often build out "docs completeness" spreadsheets where we track how completely each product feature is covered, exactly as you described. E.g. the rows are features, column B is "Reference", column C is "Tutorial" etc. So cell B1 would contain the deeplink to the reference for some particular feature. When we inherit a huge, messy docs set (which is fairly common) it can take a very long time to build out a docs completeness dashboard. I think the embeddings workflow you're suggesting could speed up the initial population of these dashboards a lot.

That it ever worked was simply that, among the universe of candidate answers, the right answer was closer to the arithmetic-result-point than other candidates – not necessarily close on any absolute scale. Especially in higher dimensions, everything gets very angularly far from everything else - the "curse of dimensionality".

But the relative differences may still be just as useful/effective. So the real evaluation of effectiveness can't be done with the raw value diff(king-man+woman, queen) alone. It needs to check if that value is less than that for every other alternative to 'queen'.

(Also: canonically these exercises were done as cosine-similarities, not Euclidean/L2 distance. Rank orders will be roughly the same if all vectors normalized to the unit sphere before arithmetic & comparisons, but if you didn't do that, it would also make these raw 'distance' values less meaningful for evaluating this particular effect. The L2 distance could be arbitrarily high for two vectors with 0.0 cosine-difference!)

So if for you the resulting doc-to-doc similarities seemed nonsensical, there was likely some process error in model training or application.