AbstractWith the rapid growth of the number of Web services on the Internet, how to classify Web services correctly and efficiently become particularly important in service management tasks, such as service discovery, service selection, service ranking, and service recommendation. Existing functionality‐based service classification techniques have some drawbacks: (1) the keyword order and context information are not considered; (2) the embedding features of keywords are taken as equal importance to learn the classification model; (3) the topic number is hard to determine manually. Due to these drawbacks, the accuracy of service classification needs to be improved further. At present, deep learning techniques show the strong power in modeling complex and nonlinear function relationship. Thus, to address the problems above, this paper exploits attention mechanism to combine the local implicit state vector of Bidirectional Long Short‐Term Memory Network (BiLSTM) and the global hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) topic vector, and proposes a Web service classification approach with topical attention‐based BiLSTM. Specifically, BiLSTM is used to automatically learn the keyword feature representations of Web services. Then, the topic vectors of Web service documents are obtained with HDP by offline training, and topic attention mechanism is adopted to strengthen the feature representation by discriminating the importance or weight of different keywords in Web service documents. Finally, the enhanced Web service feature representation is used as the input of a softmax neural network layer to perform the classification prediction for Web services. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.