mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Weller, Orion, Chang, Benjamin, Yang, Eugene, Yarmohammadi, Mahsa, Barham, Sam, MacAvaney, Sean, Cohan, Arman, Soldaini, Luca, Van Durme, Benjamin, Lawrie, Dawn
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Weller, Orion
Chang, Benjamin
Yang, Eugene
Yarmohammadi, Mahsa
Barham, Sam
MacAvaney, Sean
Cohan, Arman
Soldaini, Luca
Van Durme, Benjamin
Lawrie, Dawn
author_facet Weller, Orion
Chang, Benjamin
Yang, Eugene
Yarmohammadi, Mahsa
Barham, Sam
MacAvaney, Sean
Cohan, Arman
Soldaini, Luca
Van Durme, Benjamin
Lawrie, Dawn
contents Retrieval systems generally focus on web-style queries that are short and underspecified. However, advances in language models have facilitated the nascent rise of retrieval models that can understand more complex queries with diverse intents. However, these efforts have focused exclusively on English; therefore, we do not yet understand how they work across languages. We introduce mFollowIR, a multilingual benchmark for measuring instruction-following ability in retrieval models. mFollowIR builds upon the TREC NeuCLIR narratives (or instructions) that span three diverse languages (Russian, Chinese, Persian) giving both query and instruction to the retrieval models. We make small changes to the narratives and isolate how well retrieval models can follow these nuanced changes. We present results for both multilingual (XX-XX) and cross-lingual (En-XX) performance. We see strong cross-lingual performance with English-based retrievers that trained using instructions, but find a notable drop in performance in the multilingual setting, indicating that more work is needed in developing data for instruction-based multilingual retrievers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_19264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval
Weller, Orion
Chang, Benjamin
Yang, Eugene
Yarmohammadi, Mahsa
Barham, Sam
MacAvaney, Sean
Cohan, Arman
Soldaini, Luca
Van Durme, Benjamin
Lawrie, Dawn
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Retrieval systems generally focus on web-style queries that are short and underspecified. However, advances in language models have facilitated the nascent rise of retrieval models that can understand more complex queries with diverse intents. However, these efforts have focused exclusively on English; therefore, we do not yet understand how they work across languages. We introduce mFollowIR, a multilingual benchmark for measuring instruction-following ability in retrieval models. mFollowIR builds upon the TREC NeuCLIR narratives (or instructions) that span three diverse languages (Russian, Chinese, Persian) giving both query and instruction to the retrieval models. We make small changes to the narratives and isolate how well retrieval models can follow these nuanced changes. We present results for both multilingual (XX-XX) and cross-lingual (En-XX) performance. We see strong cross-lingual performance with English-based retrievers that trained using instructions, but find a notable drop in performance in the multilingual setting, indicating that more work is needed in developing data for instruction-based multilingual retrievers.
title mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19264