Maybe someone can offer a richer history but to my knowledge the first suggestion of word vectors was lsa which originated the idea of dimensionality reduction

Maybe someone can offer a richer history but to my knowledge the first suggestion of word vectors was lsa which originated the idea of dimensionality reduction on a term/doc matrix. They just used svd but the more modern methods are all doing essentially the same thing. To my recollection they were and HCI lab and their goal was not to make a language model as much as to make a search function for files.