# mMARCO: A Multilingual Version of the MS MARCO Passage Ranking Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09077/) (2019)
- [Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07820/) (2020)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Multi-Stage Document Ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14424/) (2019)
- [Overview of the TREC 2020 deep learning track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07662/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Similarities among Languages for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.4168/) (2013)
- [A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12309/) (2020)
- [Improving Efficient Neural Ranking Models with Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02666/) (2020)
- [Mr. TyDi: A Multi-lingual Benchmark for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08787/) (2021)
- [Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11999/) (2020)
- [The Expando-Mono-Duo Design Pattern for Text Ranking with Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05667/) (2021)
- [The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14210/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19669/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Listwise Document Reranking with a Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02156/) (2023)
- [One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13357/) (2022)
- [Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09984/) (2022)
- [Transfer Learning Approaches for Building Cross-Language Dense Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08471/) (2022)
- [KaLM-Embedding-V2: Superior Training Techniques and Data Inspire A Versatile Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20923/) (2025)
- [The Chronicles of RAG: The Retriever, the Chunk and the Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07883/) (2024)
- [Towards Best Practices for Training Multilingual Dense Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02363/) (2022)
- [Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16672/) (2024)
- [Leveraging LLMs for Synthesizing Training Data Across Many Languages in Multilingual Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05800/) (2023)
- [INDIC QA BENCHMARK: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Question Answering capability of LLMs for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13522/) (2024)
- [jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Listwise Document Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25085/) (2025)
- [Translate-Distill: Learning Cross-Language Dense Retrieval by Translation and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04810/) (2024)
- [Neural Approaches to Multilingual Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01335/) (2022)
- [GAR-meets-RAG Paradigm for Zero-Shot Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20158/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02292/) (2022)
- [RQUGE: Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Question Generation by Answering the Question](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01482/) (2022)
- [LLM-RankFusion: Mitigating Intrinsic Inconsistency in LLM-based Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00231/) (2024)
- [DuReader_retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10232/) (2022)
- [Improving Cross-lingual Information Retrieval on Low-Resource Languages via Optimal Transport Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12566/) (2023)
- [BEIR-PL: Zero Shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Polish Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19840/) (2023)
- [JaColBERTv2.5: Optimising Multi-Vector Retrievers to Create State-of-the-Art Japanese Retrievers with Constrained Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20750/) (2024)
- [F2LLM-v2: Inclusive, Performant, and Efficient Embeddings for a Multilingual World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19223/) (2026)
- [MAUPQA: Massive Automatically-created Polish Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05486/) (2023)
- [Language Models are Universal Embedders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08232/) (2023)
- [Soft Prompt Decoding for Multilingual Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09025/) (2023)
- [Piccolo2: General Text Embedding with Multi-task Hybrid Loss Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06932/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The MS MARCO ranking dataset has been widely used for training deep learning models for IR tasks, achieving considerable effectiveness on diverse zero-shot scenarios. However, this type of resource is scarce in languages other than English. In this work, we present mMARCO, a multilingual version of the MS MARCO passage ranking dataset comprising 13 languages that was created using machine translation. We evaluated mMARCO by finetuning monolingual and multilingual reranking models, as well as a multilingual dense retrieval model on this dataset. We also evaluated models finetuned using the mMARCO dataset in a zero-shot scenario on Mr. TyDi dataset, demonstrating that multilingual models finetuned on our translated dataset achieve superior effectiveness to models finetuned on the original English version alone. Our experiments also show that a distilled multilingual reranker is competitive with non-distilled models while having 5.4 times fewer parameters. Lastly, we show a positive correlation between translation quality and retrieval effectiveness, providing evidence that improvements in translation methods might lead to improvements in multilingual information retrieval. The translated datasets and finetuned models are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/mMARCO.