mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval

Orion Weller; Benjamin Chang; Eugene Yang; Mahsa Yarmohammadi; Sam Barham; Sean MacAvaney; Arman Cohan; Luca Soldaini; Benjamin Van Durme; Dawn Lawrie

arXiv · 2501.19264

mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval

Orion Weller·Benjamin Chang·Eugene Yang·Mahsa Yarmohammadi·Sam Barham·Sean MacAvaney·Arman Cohan·Luca Soldaini·Benjamin Van Durme·Dawn Lawrie

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Abstract

Retrieval systems generally focus on web-style queries that are short and underspecified. However, advances in language models have facilitated the nascent rise of retrieval models that can understand more complex queries with diverse intents. However, these efforts have focused exclusively on English; therefore, we do not yet understand how they work across languages. We introduce mFollowIR, a multilingual benchmark for measuring instruction-following ability in retrieval models. mFollowIR builds upon the TREC NeuCLIR narratives (or instructions) that span three diverse languages (Russian, Chinese, Persian) giving both query and instruction to the retrieval models. We make small changes to the narratives and isolate how well retrieval models can follow these nuanced changes. We present results for both multilingual (XX-XX) and cross-lingual (En-XX) performance. We see strong cross-lingual performance with English-based retrievers that trained using instructions, but find a notable drop in performance in the multilingual setting, indicating that more work is needed in developing data for instruction-based multilingual retrievers.

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Orion Weller, Benjamin Chang, Eugene Yang, Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Sam Barham, Sean MacAvaney, Arman Cohan, Luca Soldaini, Benjamin Van Durme, Dawn Lawrie. 2025-01-31. mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19264

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