mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

LAReQA: Language-agnostic answer retrieval from a multilingual pool

arXiv 2004.05484 ↗First posted 11 Apr 2020cs.CL cs.LGcited by 41

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

We present LAReQA, a challenging new benchmark for language-agnostic answer retrieval from a multilingual candidate pool. Unlike previous cross-lingual tasks, LAReQA tests for "strong" cross-lingual alignment, requiring semantically related cross-language pairs to be closer in representation space than unrelated same-language pairs. Building on multilingual BERT (mBERT), we study different strategies for achieving strong alignment. We find that augmenting training data via machine translation is effective, and improves significantly over using mBERT out-of-the-box. Interestingly, the embedding baseline that performs the best on LAReQA falls short of competing baselines on zero-shot variants of our task that only target "weak" alignment. This finding underscores our claim that languageagnostic retrieval is a substantively new kind of cross-lingual evaluation.

Key facts. Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2020.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 3; 2023: 10; 2024: 11; 2025: 3; 2026: 6.

41 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrievalcited by 233
  2. 2021XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluationcited by 167
  3. 2021QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehensioncited by 91
  4. 2021A Primer on Pretrained Multilingual Language Modelscited by 49
  5. 2021Revisiting the Primacy of English in Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 47
  6. 2024Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Surveycited by 34
  7. 2023Leveraging LLMs for Synthesizing Training Data Across Many Languages in Multilingual Dense Retrievalcited by 24
  8. 2021Code-Mixing on Sesame Street: Dawn of the Adversarial Polyglotscited by 23
  9. 2023Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLGcited by 22
  10. 2022Multi Task Learning For Zero Shot Performance Prediction of Multilingual Modelscited by 20
  11. 2023Exploring the Relationship between Alignment and Cross-lingual Transfer in Multilingual Transformerscited by 18
  12. 2024Discovering Low-rank Subspaces for Language-agnostic Multilingual Representationscited by 18
29 more
  1. 2021A Simple and Effective Method To Eliminate the Self Language Bias in Multilingual Representationscited by 16
  2. 2021An Objective Metric for Explainable AI: How and Why to Estimate the Degree of Explainabilitycited by 15
  3. 2022Beyond Static Models and Test Sets: Benchmarking the Potential of Pre-trained Models Across Tasks and Languagescited by 10
  4. 2023Soft Prompt Decoding for Multilingual Dense Retrievalcited by 10
  5. 2024mCSQA: Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning Dataset with Unified Creation Strategy by Language Models and Humanscited by 10
  6. 2025XRAG: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 9
  7. 2021From Philosophy to Interfaces: an Explanatory Method and a Tool Inspired by Achinstein's Theory of Explanationcited by 8
  8. 2024How Transliterations Improve Crosslingual Alignmentcited by 6
  9. 2024Analysis of Multi-Source Language Training in Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 5
  10. 2024TIGQA:An Expert Annotated Question Answering Dataset in Tigrinyacited by 5
  11. 2022Multilingual Transformer Encoders: a Word-Level Task-Agnostic Evaluationcited by 4
  12. 2023Boosting Zero-shot Cross-lingual Retrieval by Training on Artificially Code-Switched Datacited by 4
  13. 2025On the Entity-Level Alignment in Crosslingual Consistencycited by 4
  14. 2023Modeling Sequential Sentence Relation to Improve Cross-lingual Dense Retrievalcited by 3
  15. 2024What is "Typological Diversity" in NLP?cited by 3
  16. 2024Learning Job Title Representation from Job Description Aggregation Networkcited by 3
  17. 2023Language Agnostic Code Embeddingscited by 2
  18. 2024Modular Sentence Encoders: Separating Language Specialization from Cross-Lingual Alignmentcited by 2
  19. 2023Multilingual Sentence-Level Semantic Search using Meta-Distillation Learningcited by 1
  20. 2023Promoting Generalized Cross-lingual Question Answering in Few-resource Scenarios via Self-knowledge Distillationcited by 1
  21. 2023EMMA-X: An EM-like Multilingual Pre-training Algorithm for Cross-lingual Representation Learningcited by 1
  22. 2024Synergistic Approach for Simultaneous Optimization of Monolingual, Cross-lingual, and Multilingual Information Retrievalcited by 1
  23. 2025Generative Query Expansion with Multilingual LLMs for Cross-Lingual Information Retrievalcited by 0
  24. 2026One Instruction Does Not Fit All: How Well Do Embeddings Align Personas and Instructions in Low-Resource Indian Languages?cited by 0
  25. 2026Why Better Cross-Lingual Alignment Fails for Better Cross-Lingual Transfer: Case of Encoderscited by 0
  26. 2026AfrIFact: Cultural Information Retrieval, Evidence Extraction and Fact Checking for African Languagescited by 0
  27. 2026MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectivescited by 0
  28. 2026SHIFT: Semantic Harmonization via Index-side Feature Transformation for Multilingual Information Retrievalcited by 0
  29. 2026There is No Theoretical Curse of Multilinguality For Embedding Space Structurecited by 0