Papers › Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributed Semantics

Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributed Semantics

17 Apr 2014ACL 2014 6arXiv:1404.4641archive 2025-07-28

Karl Moritz Hermann, Phil Blunsom

We present a novel technique for learning semantic representations, which extends the distributional hypothesis to multilingual data and joint-space embeddings. Our models leverage parallel data and learn to strongly align the embeddings of semantically equivalent sentences, while maintaining sufficient distance between those of dissimilar sentences. The models do not rely on word alignments or any syntactic information and are successfully applied to a number of diverse languages. We extend our approach to learn semantic representations at the document level, too. We evaluate these models on two cross-lingual document classification tasks, outperforming the prior state of the art. Through qualitative analysis and the study of pivoting effects we demonstrate that our representations are semantically plausible and can capture semantic relationships across languages without parallel data.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

karlmoritz/bicvm mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Cross-Lingual Document ClassificationDocument ClassificationGeneral ClassificationLearning Semantic Representations

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Cross-Lingual Document Classification Reuters RCV1/RCV2 English-to-German Bi+ Accuracy 88.1 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual Document Classification Reuters RCV1/RCV2 German-to-English Bi+ Accuracy 79.2 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections