@inproceedings{pappas-popescu-belis-2017-multilingual,
    title = "Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification",
    author = "Pappas, Nikolaos  and
      Popescu-Belis, Andrei",
    editor = "Kondrak, Greg  and
      Watanabe, Taro",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Taipei, Taiwan",
    publisher = "Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/I17-1102/",
    pages = "1015--1025",
    abstract = "Hierarchical attention networks have recently achieved remarkable performance for document classification in a given language. However, when multilingual document collections are considered, training such models separately for each language entails linear parameter growth and lack of cross-language transfer. Learning a single multilingual model with fewer parameters is therefore a challenging but potentially beneficial objective. To this end, we propose multilingual hierarchical attention networks for learning document structures, with shared encoders and/or shared attention mechanisms across languages, using multi-task learning and an aligned semantic space as input. We evaluate the proposed models on multilingual document classification with disjoint label sets, on a large dataset which we provide, with 600k news documents in 8 languages, and 5k labels. The multilingual models outperform monolingual ones in low-resource as well as full-resource settings, and use fewer parameters, thus confirming their computational efficiency and the utility of cross-language transfer."
}