Fine-tuning Multilingual Embeddings with Domain-specific Code-switched Data for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Retrieval Performance

Abstract

Abstract: Transferring information retrieval (IR) models from a high-resource language (typically English) to other languages in a zero-shot fashion has become a widely adopted approach. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of zero-shot rankers diminishes when queries and documents are present in different languages. Motivated by this, we propose to train ranking models on artificially code-switched data instead, which we generate by utilizing bilingual lexicons. To this end, we experiment with lexicons induced from (1) cross-lingual word embeddings and (2) parallel Wikipedia page titles. We use

Research Question

To what extent does fine-tuning multilingual embeddings on domain-specific artificially code-switched data improve zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval performance compared to general-domain code-switched data, evaluated on NDCG@10 and MRR?

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