Improving Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Retrieval Robustness via Code-Switched Training

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: Does training zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval models on code-switched data improve their robustness to out-of-domain queries, as measured by accuracy on XTREME-R when tested on domains not present in the training data?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.5/10.