Don't know if you tried it on 16.09 when this was harder, but now you can just strip off the /c/en/ and the rest has exactly the same normalization as word2vec.

Don't know if you tried it on 16.09 when this was harder, but now you can just strip off the /c/en/ and the rest has exactly the same normalization as word2vec. Even including the weird thing with changing multiple digits to # signs. There is also a Python function included that does the normalization. But it's pretty simple and if you're already using word2vec you're already doing it.