CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents

Francisco Valentini, Diego Kozlowski, Vincent Lariviere


Abstract
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) helps users find documents in languages different from their queries. This is especially important in academic search, where key research is often published in non-English languages. We present CLIRudit, a novel English-French academic retrieval dataset built from Érudit, a Canadian publishing platform. Using multilingual metadata, we pair English author-written keywords as queries with non-English abstracts as target documents, a method that can be applied to other languages and repositories. We benchmark various first-stage sparse and dense retrievers, with and without machine translation. We find that dense embeddings without translation perform nearly as well as systems using machine translation, that translating documents is generally more effective than translating queries, and that sparse retrievers with document translation remain competitive while offering greater efficiency. Along with releasing the first English-French academic retrieval dataset, we provide a reproducible benchmarking method to improve access to non-English scholarly content.
Anthology ID:
2025.mrl-main.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhuo, China
Editors:
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Catherine Arnett, Duygu Ataman, Tyler A. Chang, Hila Gonen, Rahul Raja, Fabian Schmidt, David Stap, Jiayi Wang
Venues:
MRL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
226–242
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.mrl-main.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francisco Valentini, Diego Kozlowski, and Vincent Lariviere. 2025. CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025), pages 226–242, Suzhuo, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents (Valentini et al., MRL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.mrl-main.16.pdf