The RUFINO team proposed a non-supervised, conceptually-simple and low-cost approach for addressing the Multilingual and Cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity challenge at SemEval 2017. The proposed systems were cross-lingual extensions of popular monolingual lexical similarity approaches such as PMI and word2vec. The extensions were possible by means of a small parallel list of concepts similar to the Swadesh’s list, which we obtained in a semi-automatic way. In spite of its simplicity, our approach showed to be effective obtaining statistically-significant and consistent results in all datasets proposed for the task. Besides, we provide some research directions for improving this novel and affordable approach.