Publikation
Enabling Low-Resource Language Retrieval: Establishing Baselines for Urdu MS MARCO
Muhammad Umer Tariq Butt; Stalin Varanasi; Günter Neumann
In: 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR-2025), April 6-10, Lucca, Italy, ECIR, 4/2025.
Zusammenfassung
As the Information Retrieval (IR) field increasingly recognizes the importance of inclusivity, addressing the needs of low-resource
languages remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces the first large-scale Urdu IR dataset, created by translating the MS MARCO
dataset through machine translation.We establish baseline results through zero-shot learning for IR in Urdu and subsequently apply the mMARCO
multilingual IR methodology to this newly translated dataset. Our findings demonstrate that the fine-tuned model (Urdu-mT5-mMARCO) achieves
a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR@10) of 0.247 and a Recall@10 of 0.439, representing significant improvements over zero-shot results and showing
the potential for expanding IR access for Urdu speakers. By bridging access gaps for speakers of low-resource languages, this work not only
advances multilingual IR research but also emphasizes the ethical and societal importance of inclusive IR technologies. This work provides valuable
insights into the challenges and solutions for improving language representation and lays the groundwork for future research, especially in
South Asian languages, which can benefit from the adaptable methods used in this study.