Impact of Synthetic Code-Switched Training on Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Retriever Robustness Against Adversarial Perturbations

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 goal: How does training on synthetic code-switched data affect the robustness of zero-shot cross-lingual retrievers against adversarial perturbations measured by accuracy degradation on the CBIA benchmark?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.3/10.