{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distillation-for-multilingual-information","title":"Distillation for Multilingual Information Retrieval","arxiv_id":"2405.00977","date":"2024-05-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eugene Yang","Dawn Lawrie","James Mayfield"],"abstract":"Recent work in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has shown the benefit of the Translate-Distill framework that trains a cross-language neural dual-encoder model using translation and distillation. However, Translate-Distill only supports a single document language. Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR), which ranks a multilingual document collection, is harder to train than CLIR because the model must assign comparable relevance scores to documents in different languages. This work extends Translate-Distill and propose Multilingual Translate-Distill (MTD) for MLIR. We show that ColBERT-X models trained with MTD outperform their counterparts trained ith Multilingual Translate-Train, which is the previous state-of-the-art training approach, by 5% to 25% in nDCG@20 and 15% to 45% in MAP. We also show that the model is robust to the way languages are mixed in training batches. Our implementation is available on GitHub.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00977v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.00977v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distillation-for-multilingual-information","repo_url":"https://github.com/hltcoe/colbert-x","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.00977","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}