# IndicIRSuite: Multilingual Dataset and Neural Information Models for Indian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09508 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09508/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16307/) (2023)
- [Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05596/) (2021)
- [Mr. TyDi: A Multi-lingual Benchmark for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08787/) (2021)
- [mMARCO: A Multilingual Version of the MS MARCO Passage Ranking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13897/) (2021)
- [Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09984/) (2022)
- [IndicBART: A Pre-trained Model for Indic Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02903/) (2021)
- [Neural Approaches to Multilingual Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01335/) (2022)
- [Improving Cross-lingual Information Retrieval on Low-Resource Languages via Optimal Transport Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12566/) (2023)
- [Simple Yet Effective Neural Ranking and Reranking Baselines for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01019/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)
- [Hindi-BEIR : A Large Scale Retrieval Benchmark in Hindi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09437/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Building Zero-Shot Hindi Retrieval Model with Hindi-BEIR and NLLB-E5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05401/) (2024)
- [IndicRAGSuite: Large-Scale Datasets and a Benchmark for Indian Language RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01615/) (2025)
- [IKS-Instruct: A 24,000-Example Multilingual Dataset for Teaching Language Models Indian Knowledge Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23322/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce Neural Information Retrieval resources for 11 widely spoken Indian Languages (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu) from two major Indian language families (Indo-Aryan and Dravidian). These resources include (a) INDIC-MARCO, a multilingual version of the MSMARCO dataset in 11 Indian Languages created using Machine Translation, and (b) Indic-ColBERT, a collection of 11 distinct Monolingual Neural Information Retrieval models, each trained on one of the 11 languages in the INDIC-MARCO dataset. To the best of our knowledge, IndicIRSuite is the first attempt at building large-scale Neural Information Retrieval resources for a large number of Indian languages, and we hope that it will help accelerate research in Neural IR for Indian Languages. Experiments demonstrate that Indic-ColBERT achieves 47.47% improvement in the MRR@10 score averaged over the INDIC-MARCO baselines for all 11 Indian languages except Oriya, 12.26% improvement in the NDCG@10 score averaged over the MIRACL Bengali and Hindi Language baselines, and 20% improvement in the MRR@100 Score over the Mr.Tydi Bengali Language baseline. IndicIRSuite is available at https://github.com/saifulhaq95/IndicIRSuite