Artificial Code-Switching in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Retrieval Performance

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: To what extent do artificially code-switched training data improve zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval performance when evaluated on low-resource language pairs (e.g., English-Swahili) compared to high-resource language pairs (e.g., English-Spanish), using nDCG@10 as the primary metric? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.1/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 8.1/10.