# Dense Retrieval for Low Resource Languages -- the Case of Amharic Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18570/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [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)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [A Monolingual Approach to Contextualized Word Embeddings for Mid-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06202/) (2020)
- [From Distillation to Hard Negative Sampling: Making Sparse Neural IR Models More Effective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04733/) (2022)
- [SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06789/) (2024)
- [Introducing various Semantic Models for Amharic: Experimentation and Evaluation with multiple Tasks and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01154/) (2020)
- [Training on the Test Model: Contamination in Ranking Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02284/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AmharicIR+Instr: A Two-Dataset Resource for Neural Retrieval and Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09914/) (2026)
- [BETA-Labeling for Multilingual Dataset Construction in Low-Resource IR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14488/) (2026)
- [Where Does Retrieval Fail? Evaluating RAG Architectures for Agricultural Advisory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14886/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper reports some difficulties and some results when using dense retrievers on Amharic, one of the low-resource languages spoken by 120 millions populations. The efforts put and difficulties faced by University Addis Ababa toward Amharic Information Retrieval will be developed during the presentation.