The contradictory results in (Baroni et al., 2014) stem from creating word2vec embeddings with somewhat pre-tuned hyperparameters (recommended by word2vec), and comparing them to "vanilla" PPMI and SVD representations.
shifted PMI (negative sampling) and context distribution smoothing (cds = 0.75, equation 3in Section 3.2) were turned on for SGNS, but not for PPMI and SVD.