Retrieval-augmented generation in multilingual settings
Nadezhda Chirkova, David Rau, Hervé Déjean, Thibault Formal, Stéphane Clinchant, Vassilina Nikoulina
Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a promising solution for incorporating up-to-date or domain-specific knowledge into large language models (LLMs) and improving LLM factuality, but is predominantly studied in English-only settings. In this work, we consider RAG in the multilingual setting (mRAG), i.e. with user queries and the datastore in 13 languages, and investigate which components and with which adjustments are needed to build a well-performing mRAG pipeline, that can be used as a strong baseline in future works. Our findings highlight that despite the availability of high-quality off-the-shelf multilingual retrievers and generators, task-specific prompt engineering is needed to enable generation in user languages. Moreover, current evaluation metrics need adjustments for multilingual setting, to account for variations in spelling named entities. The main limitations to be addressed in future works include frequent code-switching in non-Latin alphabet languages, occasional fluency errors, wrong reading of the provided documents, or irrelevant retrieval. We release the code for the resulting mRAG baseline pipeline at https://github.com/naver/bergen, Documentation: https://github.com/naver/bergen/blob/main/documentations/multilingual.md.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.knowllm-1.15
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Language Models (KnowLLM 2024)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Sha Li, Manling Li, Michael JQ Zhang, Eunsol Choi, Mor Geva, Peter Hase, Heng Ji
- Venues:
- KnowLLM | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 177–188
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.knowllm-1.15
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nadezhda Chirkova, David Rau, Hervé Déjean, Thibault Formal, Stéphane Clinchant, and Vassilina Nikoulina. 2024. Retrieval-augmented generation in multilingual settings. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Language Models (KnowLLM 2024), pages 177–188, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Retrieval-augmented generation in multilingual settings (Chirkova et al., KnowLLM-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.knowllm-1.15.pdf