Examining and Adapting Time for Multilingual Classification via Mixture of Temporal Experts

Weisi Liu, Guangzeng Han, Xiaolei Huang


Abstract
Time is implicitly embedded in classification process: classifiers are usually built on existing data while to be applied on future data whose distributions (e.g., label and token) may change. However, existing state-of-the-art classification models merely consider the temporal variations and primarily focus on English corpora, which leaves temporal studies less explored, let alone under multilingual settings. In this study, we fill the gap by treating time as domains (e.g., 2024 vs. 2025), examining temporal effects, and developing a domain adaptation framework to generalize classifiers over time on four languages, English, Danish, French, and German. Our framework proposes Mixture of Temporal Experts (MoTE) to leverage both semantic and data distributional shifts to learn and adapt temporal trends into classification models. Our analysis shows classification performance varies over time across different languages, and we experimentally demonstrate that MoTE can enhance classifier generalizability over temporal data shifts. Our study provides analytic insights and addresses the need for time-aware models that perform robustly in multilingual scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.313
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6151–6166
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.313/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weisi Liu, Guangzeng Han, and Xiaolei Huang. 2025. Examining and Adapting Time for Multilingual Classification via Mixture of Temporal Experts. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6151–6166, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Examining and Adapting Time for Multilingual Classification via Mixture of Temporal Experts (Liu et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.313.pdf