  Typical techniques for sequence classification are designed for
well-segmented sequences which have been edited to remove noisy or irrelevant
parts. Therefore, such methods cannot be easily applied on noisy sequences
expected in real-world applications. In this paper, we present the Temporal
Attention-Gated Model (TAGM) which integrates ideas from attention models and
gated recurrent networks to better deal with noisy or unsegmented sequences.
Specifically, we extend the concept of attention model to measure the relevance
of each observation (time step) of a sequence. We then use a novel gated
recurrent network to learn the hidden representation for the final prediction.
An important advantage of our approach is interpretability since the temporal
attention weights provide a meaningful value for the salience of each time step
in the sequence. We demonstrate the merits of our TAGM approach, both for
prediction accuracy and interpretability, on three different tasks: spoken
digit recognition, text-based sentiment analysis and visual event recognition.
