Cool rspeer, we will check NumberBatch out! Yes, as you say, our goal here is to show you can get something for nothing from pre-trained embeddings (I can learn the 78 matrices on my macbook in about ten minutes...).

The alignment procedure is completely agnostic to what word vectors you use. It only requires that cosine similarity is a good distance metric. We used fastText because there were lots of open-sourced vectors available...