  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.
