Abstract Bilingual word embeddings (BWEs) have been shown to be useful in various cross-lingual natural language processing tasks. To accurately learn BWEs, previous studies often resort to discriminative approaches which explore semantic proximities between translation equivalents of different languages. Instead, in this paper, we propose a neural generative bilingual autoencoder (NGBAE) which introduces a latent variable to explicitly induce the underlying semantics of bilingual text. In this way, NGBAE is able to obtain better BWEs from more robust bilingual semantics by modeling the semantic distributions of bilingual text. In order to facilitate scalable inference and learning, we utilize deep neural networks to perform the recognition and generation procedures, and then employ stochastic gradient variational Bayes algorithm to optimize them jointly. We validate the proposed model via both extrinsic (cross-lingual document classification and translation probability modeling) and intrinsic (word embedding analysis) evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of NGBAE on learning BWEs.