Code-Switched Pre-training Data Ratios for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Retrieval in Low-Resource African Languages

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 ratio of code-switched pre-training data affect zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval accuracy for low-resource African languages compared to monolingual pre-training baselines? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.4/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 8.4/10.