This work presents an empirical comparison among three widespread word embedding techniques as Latent Semantic Indexing, Random Indexing and the more recent Word2Vec. Specifically, we employed these techniques to learn a lowdimensional vector space word representation and we exploited it to represent both items and user profiles in a content-based recommendation scenario. The performance of the techniques has been evaluated against two state-ofthe-art datasets, and experimental results provided good insights which pave the way to several future directions.