Enhancing Cross-Lingual Alignment via Hybrid Training with Artificial Code-Switching and Back-Translation

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: Can hybrid training approaches combining artificially code-switched data and back-translated data further enhance cross-lingual alignment, as validated by zero-shot retrieval performance on DIR-NDCG or CrossLingual MRR benchmarks?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.1/10.