A Critique of a Critique of Word Similarity Datasets: Sanity Check or Unnecessary Confusion?

Critical evaluation of word similarity datasets is very important for computational lexical semantics. This short report concerns the sanity check proposed in Batchkarov et al. (2016) to evaluate several popular datasets such as MC, RG and MEN – the first two reportedly failed. I argue that this test is unstable, offers no added insight, and needs major revision in order to fulfill its purported goal.