Multilingual IR

IR: Information Retrieval

Ask about this topic

Overview

Multilingual information retrieval studies how to find relevant documents when queries and documents use different languages, scripts, or specialized vocabulary. Systems range from BM25 and hybrid sparse-dense search to multilingual embeddings, late-interaction models, translation, cross-lingual alignment, fine-tuning, and reranking. Evaluation spans benchmarks such as MIRACL and mMARCO as well as low-resource languages and specialized settings like medicine, law, and web search, often measuring retrieval for downstream question answering and RAG. Strong multilingual models can still lag behind language-specific systems, with performance varying by language and domain, so a central challenge is improving cross-language transfer without sacrificing accuracy, efficiency, or coverage for underrepresented languages.

Latest papers

CardsList

53 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, up 75% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Machine-Readable Operator Manuals over the ISO 11783 Network for Offline, Multilingual LLM Assistance

    Oct 22, 2026Timo Oksanen, Julius GunData IntegrationMultilingual QA

    Chair of Agrimechatronics, Technical University of Munich, Germany · Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Germany

  2. Evidence-Gated Bilingual RAG for Reliable Consumer Banking Search

    Oct 15, 2026Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud Rayyan, Rana Mahmoud Mohammed, Aya Abdallah Abdelmonem +2Retrieval-Augmented GenerationMultilingual IR

    School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

  3. Retrieval Disagreement as a Signal: Diagnosing and Steering Multilingual Dense Embedders

    Oct 13, 2026Faeze Ghorbanpour, Shaghayegh Kolli, Jana Diesner +1Multilingual IRRepresentation Steering

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, TU Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)

  4. KhyontekAI at CheckThat! 2026: Multilingual Dense Retrieval and Cross-Encoder Reranking for Scientific Web Claims

    Oct 11, 2026Bhargab Jyoti Bhuyan, Pritam DekaScientific Document RetrievalMultilingual IR

    Computer Science and Engineering Department, School of Engineering, Tezpur University, Assam, India · KhyontekAI, Guwahati, Assam, India

  5. Amharic-English Cross-Language Question Answering Using Statistical Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Semantic Indexing

    Oct 10, 2026Emebet Bekele, Fekade GetahunMultilingual QAMultilingual IR

    Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  6. HyperBrowseComp: A Multilingual and Multimodal Stress Test for Web-Browsing Agents

    Oct 2, 2026Alham Fikri Aji, Faiz Rizki Ramadhan, Zayd M. K. Zuhri +14Web Agent BenchmarksAgent Benchmarks

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute · Inception AI +2

  7. Query-aware routing for Cross-lingual performance gains in Encoders

    Oct 2, 2026Akshay Jain, Edward KimMultilingual IRCross-Lingual Transfer

    ConfidentialMind

  8. Cross-Lingual Legal QA for Vietnamese Labour Law: Retrieval, Translation, and Verifier-Guided Correction

    Sep 23, 2026Nguyen Minh Chi, Mo El-Haj, Nguyen Ha Thanh +2LLM Answer VerificationLegal Citation Verification

    VinUniversity, Vietnam · Lancaster University, UK · Cardiff University, UK

  9. ChemCLIR-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval in Multilingual Chemical Patents

    Sep 19, 2026Mahdi Astaraki, Mohammad Khodadad, Reza Namazi +4Multilingual IRInformation Retrieval

    Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada · BASF Canada Inc., Canada

  10. Parameter-Efficient Retrievers for Polish and European Languages

    Sep 11, 2026Sławomir Dadas, Rafał Poświata, Małgorzata Grębowiec +1Multilingual IRInformation Retrieval

    National Information Processing Institute al. Niepodległości 188b, 00-608 Warsaw, Poland

  11. Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

    Sep 8, 2026Maximilian Schall, Sedigheh Eslami, Markus Krimmel +4Agentic RetrievalMultilingual IR

    Perplexity AI

  12. Wontopos Tablet 2: Measuring Multilingual and Multimodal Memory Retrieval Without Lexical Matching

    Aug 24, 2026Sunwoo KimPersistent Memory for Language ModelsMultilingual IR

    Wontopos L.L.C.

  13. LëtzCross: A Cross-Lingual Page-Level Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval over Luxembourgish Documents

    Aug 22, 2026Omar El Bachyr, Fred Philippy, Laura Maria Bernardy +3Multilingual IRVisual Document Retrieval

    University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg · King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia

  14. Where Does Retrieval Fail? Evaluating RAG Architectures for Agricultural Advisory

    Aug 14, 2026Khan Raiyan Ibne Reza, Sanjana Aktar Maria, Sumaiya Tabassum NimiInformation RetrievalRAG Evaluation

    North South University Dhaka, Bangladesh

  15. Better Decomposition, Free Aggregation: A Synthesizer-Folding Framework for Multilingual Multi-Hop Question Answering

    Aug 13, 2026Yilin Wang, Yuchun Fan, Weidong Bao +5Multi-Hop QARetrieval-Augmented Generation

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · Yunnan Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

  16. Teaching Nemotron Greek: Mining a Corpus, Adapting Retrieval, and Grounding Generation for Modern Greek across Specialist Domains

    Aug 5, 2026Ayoub Kirouane, Christos PetrocheilosRetrieval-Augmented GenerationLLM Grounding

    Sophea AI, KIEFER SA, Athens, Greece

  17. Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval

    Aug 3, 2026Chao Huang, Yufeng Chen, Changhao Guan +3Contrastive LearningDisentangled Representation Learning

    Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation (Beijing Jiaotong University), Ministry of Education · School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University

  18. DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Search

    Jul 29, 2026Raphaël Sourty, Antoine Chaffin, Paulo Roberto Moura Junior +1Late Interaction RetrievalCode Search

    1LightOn

  19. A Comparative Evaluation of Embeddings and LLMs in a Greek Book Publisher Setting - The CUP Dataset

    Jul 23, 2026Katerina Papantoniou, Panagiotis Papadakos, Theodore Patkos +3Text Embedding EvaluationMultilingual IR

    ICS-FORTH Heraklion, Greece · Crete University Press Heraklion, Greece · University of Crete, Computer Science Department, Heraklion, Greece

  20. Echoes Across Vietnam's Highlands, Delta, and Coast: A Multilingual Corpus for Cham, Khmer, and Tay-Nung

    Jul 9, 2026Anh Trac Duc Dinh, Khang Nhat Hoang Vo, Vinh Cong Doan +2Multilingual Language Model EvaluationMultilingual IR

    Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  21. Field Order Should Not Matter: Permutation-Invariant Embedding Model Fine-Tuning for Structured Metadata Retrieval

    Jun 29, 2026Aivin V. Solatorio, Olivier Dupriez, Rafael MacalabaMultilingual IRInformation Retrieval

    Development Data Group, Office of the Chief Statistician, World Bank Group

  22. MMed-Bench-IR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Multilingual Medical Information Retrieval

    Jun 23, 2026Junhyeok Lee, Han Jang, Hyeonjin Goh +1Multilingual IRInformation Retrieval

    Seoul National University · Seoul National University College of Medicine · Seoul National University Hospital

  23. Lychee-Reranker: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking

    Jun 22, 2026Xinping Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Ziqi Dai +9Representation LearningLearning to Rank

    Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · Soochow University

  24. HAKARI-Bench: A Lightweight Benchmark for Comparing Retrieval Architectures and Efficiency Settings under Unified Conditions

    Jun 22, 2026Yuichi TatenoBenchmark DesignText Embedding Evaluation

  25. SHIFT: Semantic Harmonization via Index-side Feature Transformation for Multilingual Information Retrieval

    Jun 17, 2026Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Hyeonseok Moon +1Cross-Lingual Representation AlignmentMultilingual IR

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University

  26. Beyond Monolingual Deep Research: Evaluating Agents and Retrievers with Cross-Lingual BrowseComp-Plus

    Jun 13, 2026Yuheng Lu, Qingcheng Zeng, Heli Qi +6Multilingual Language Model EvaluationDeep Research Agents

    Waseda University · Northwestern University · RIKEN AIP +4

  27. When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

    Jun 11, 2026Tongyao Zhu, Chao-Ming Huang, Min-Yen KanMultilingual IRDense Retrieval

    National University of Singapore

  28. LCSHBench: A Multilingual, Consensus-Grounded Benchmark for Library of Congress Subject Heading Assignment

    Jun 3, 2026Kwok Leong TangLibrary and Information ScienceMultilingual IR

  29. MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectives

    May 29, 2026Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Heuiseok LimContrastive LearningCross-Lingual Representation Alignment

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University

  30. Generalistic or Specific Embeddings, Which is Better? An Empirical Study on Search for Clinical Coding in Non-English Languages

    May 28, 2026David Rey-Blanco, Roberto CruzData AugmentationHealthcare

    TietAI