Challenge: Using zero-shot rankers, cross-lingual IR models are limited by their language coverage.
Approach: They propose to train ranking models on artificially code-switched data instead of using a dictionary.
Outcome: The proposed approach is robust towards the ratio of code-switched tokens and extends to unseen languages.

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Challenge: Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries . however, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages .
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Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Reranking with Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (2024.acl-short)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive zero-shot capabilities in various passage ranking tasks.
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Cross-Lingual Training of Neural Models for Document Ranking (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a recent study shows that multi-lingual BERT models can be used for document ranking in non-English languages . a blog post by Google suggests that the company is exploring this approach to improve web search across a number of languages.
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Cross-Lingual Transfer in Zero-Shot Cross-Language Entity Linking (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work on cross-language entity linking grounds mentions written in multiple languages to a monolingual knowledge base is lacking.
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Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art neural rankers are notoriously data-hungry and rarely used in multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval settings.
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Model-Based Ranking of Source Languages for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: NN-Rank is an algorithm for ranking source languages for cross-lingual transfer . it leverages hidden representations from multilingual models and unlabeled target-language data .
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Can Monolingual Pretrained Models Help Cross-Lingual Classification? (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Multilingual pretrained language models have shown impressive results for cross-lingual transfer, but due to the constant model capacity, multilingual pre-training usually lags behind the monolingual competitors.
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Exploring efficient zero-shot synthetic dataset generation for Information Retrieval (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models offer a new avenue of generating synthetic training data to train neural retrieval models for unlabelled data collections.
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Code-Switching Information Retrieval: Benchmarks, Analysis, and the Limits of Current Retrievers (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a new study examines the performance of code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . code-witching is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in global communication .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . they propose CS-MTEB, which measures performance declines of up to 27% .
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Improving Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning via Robust Training (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained multilingual language encoders do not precisely align words and phrases across languages.
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