  Recent work on learning multilingual word representations usually relies on
the use of word-level alignements (e.g. infered with the help of GIZA++)
between translated sentences, in order to align the word embeddings in
different languages. In this workshop paper, we investigate an autoencoder
model for learning multilingual word representations that does without such
word-level alignements. The autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the
bag-of-word representation of given sentence from an encoded representation
extracted from its translation. We evaluate our approach on a multilingual
document classification task, where labeled data is available only for one
language (e.g. English) while classification must be performed in a different
language (e.g. French). In our experiments, we observe that our method compares
favorably with a previously proposed method that exploits word-level alignments
to learn word representations.
