The Illustrated Word2vec – Jay Alammar – Visualizing machine learning one concept at a time.
https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/
I hope that you now have a sense for word embeddings and the word2vec algorithm. I also hope that now when you read a paper mentioning “skip gram with negative sampling” (SGNS) (like the recommendation system papers at the top), that you have a better sense for these concepts.