Zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval on artificial code-switched data across Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan families

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 the performance of zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval models compare when trained on artificially code-switched data across different language families (e.g., Indo-European vs. Sino-Tibetan) as measured by XTREME-R MRR scores?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.5/10.