mAggretriever: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval

Sheng-Chieh Lin, Amin Ahmad, Jimmy Lin


Abstract
Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) is a crucial yet challenging task due to the need for human annotations in multiple languages, making training data creation labor-intensive. In this paper, we introduce mAggretriever, which effectively leverages semantic and lexical features from pre-trained multilingual transformers (e.g., mBERT and XLM-R) for dense retrieval. To enhance training and inference efficiency, we employ approximate masked-language modeling prediction for computing lexical features, reducing 70–85% GPU memory requirement for mAggretriever fine-tuning. Empirical results demonstrate that mAggretriever, fine-tuned solely on English training data, surpasses existing state-of-the-art multilingual dense retrieval models that undergo further training on large-scale MLIR training data. Our code is available at url.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.715
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11688–11696
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.715
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.715
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sheng-Chieh Lin, Amin Ahmad, and Jimmy Lin. 2023. mAggretriever: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11688–11696, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
mAggretriever: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval (Lin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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