{"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/on-cross-lingual-retrieval-with-multilingual","title":"On Cross-Lingual Retrieval with Multilingual Text Encoders","arxiv_id":"2112.11031","date":"2021-12-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Robert Litschko","Ivan Vulić","Simone Paolo Ponzetto","Goran Glavaš"],"abstract":"In this work we present a systematic empirical study focused on the suitability of the state-of-the-art multilingual encoders for cross-lingual document and sentence retrieval tasks across a number of diverse language pairs. We first treat these models as multilingual text encoders and benchmark their performance in unsupervised ad-hoc sentence- and document-level CLIR. In contrast to supervised language understanding, our results indicate that for unsupervised document-level CLIR -- a setup with no relevance judgments for IR-specific fine-tuning -- pretrained multilingual encoders on average fail to significantly outperform earlier models based on CLWEs. For sentence-level retrieval, we do obtain state-of-the-art performance: the peak scores, however, are met by multilingual encoders that have been further specialized, in a supervised fashion, for sentence understanding tasks, rather than using their vanilla 'off-the-shelf' variants. Following these results, we introduce localized relevance matching for document-level CLIR, where we independently score a query against document sections. In the second part, we evaluate multilingual encoders fine-tuned in a supervised fashion (i.e., we learn to rank) on English relevance data in a series of zero-shot language and domain transfer CLIR experiments. Our results show that supervised re-ranking rarely improves the performance of multilingual transformers as unsupervised base rankers. Finally, only with in-domain contrastive fine-tuning (i.e., same domain, only language transfer), we manage to improve the ranking quality. We uncover substantial empirical differences between cross-lingual retrieval results and results of (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer for monolingual retrieval in target languages, which point to \"monolingual overfitting\" of retrieval models trained on monolingual data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11031v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.11031v1.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":"on-cross-lingual-retrieval-with-multilingual","repo_url":"https://github.com/rlitschk/EncoderCLIR","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Cross-Lingual Transfer"},{"task_slug":"re-ranking","task_name":"Re-Ranking"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"sentence-retrieval","task_name":"Sentence Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"base","method_name":"BASE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.11031","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}