BEIR-NL: Zero-shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Dutch Language

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Hauptverfasser: Banar, Nikolay, Lotfi, Ehsan, Daelemans, Walter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Banar, Nikolay
Lotfi, Ehsan
Daelemans, Walter
author_facet Banar, Nikolay
Lotfi, Ehsan
Daelemans, Walter
contents Zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval (IR) models is often performed using BEIR; a large and heterogeneous benchmark composed of multiple datasets, covering different retrieval tasks across various domains. Although BEIR has become a standard benchmark for the zero-shot setup, its exclusively English content reduces its utility for underrepresented languages in IR, including Dutch. To address this limitation and encourage the development of Dutch IR models, we introduce BEIR-NL by automatically translating the publicly accessible BEIR datasets into Dutch. Using BEIR-NL, we evaluated a wide range of multilingual dense ranking and reranking models, as well as the lexical BM25 method. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline, and is only outperformed by the larger dense models trained for retrieval. When combined with reranking models, BM25 achieves performance on par with the best dense ranking models. In addition, we explored the impact of translation on the data by back-translating a selection of datasets to English, and observed a performance drop for both dense and lexical methods, indicating the limitations of translation for creating benchmarks. BEIR-NL is publicly available on the Hugging Face hub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08329
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BEIR-NL: Zero-shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Dutch Language
Banar, Nikolay
Lotfi, Ehsan
Daelemans, Walter
Computation and Language
Zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval (IR) models is often performed using BEIR; a large and heterogeneous benchmark composed of multiple datasets, covering different retrieval tasks across various domains. Although BEIR has become a standard benchmark for the zero-shot setup, its exclusively English content reduces its utility for underrepresented languages in IR, including Dutch. To address this limitation and encourage the development of Dutch IR models, we introduce BEIR-NL by automatically translating the publicly accessible BEIR datasets into Dutch. Using BEIR-NL, we evaluated a wide range of multilingual dense ranking and reranking models, as well as the lexical BM25 method. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline, and is only outperformed by the larger dense models trained for retrieval. When combined with reranking models, BM25 achieves performance on par with the best dense ranking models. In addition, we explored the impact of translation on the data by back-translating a selection of datasets to English, and observed a performance drop for both dense and lexical methods, indicating the limitations of translation for creating benchmarks. BEIR-NL is publicly available on the Hugging Face hub.
title BEIR-NL: Zero-shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Dutch Language
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08329