MiLQ: Benchmarking IR Models for Bilingual Web Search with Mixed Language Queries

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16631v1
• Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 13:03:15 GMT
• Title: MiLQ: Benchmarking IR Models for Bilingual Web Search with Mixed Language Queries
• Authors: Jonghwi Kim, Deokhyung Kang, Seonjeong Hwang, Yunsu Kim, Jungseul Ok, Gary Lee,
• Abstract summary: We introduce MiLQ,Mixed-Language Query test set, the first public benchmark of mixed-language queries.<n>Experiments show that multilingual IR models perform moderately on MiLQ and inconsistently across native, English, and mixed-language queries.<n> intentional English mixing in queries proves an effective strategy for bilinguals searching English documents.
• Score: 7.198090470473247
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Despite bilingual speakers frequently using mixed-language queries in web searches, Information Retrieval (IR) research on them remains scarce. To address this, we introduce MiLQ,Mixed-Language Query test set, the first public benchmark of mixed-language queries, confirmed as realistic and highly preferred. Experiments show that multilingual IR models perform moderately on MiLQ and inconsistently across native, English, and mixed-language queries, also suggesting code-switched training data's potential for robust IR models handling such queries. Meanwhile, intentional English mixing in queries proves an effective strategy for bilinguals searching English documents, which our analysis attributes to enhanced token matching compared to native queries.

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