ColBERT-X for English-German/Spanish/French MLIR using Multilingual Translate-Distill

MLIR Model Setting

• Query language: English
• Query length: 32 token max
• Document language: German/Spanish/French
• Document length: 180 token max (please use MaxP to aggregate the passage score if needed)

Model Description

Multilingual Translate-Distill is a training technique that produces state-of-the-art MLIR dense retrieval model through translation and distillation. plaidx-large-clef-mtd-round-robin-entries-mt5xxl-engeng is trained with KL-Divergence from the mt5xxl MonoT5 reranker unicamp-dl/mt5-13b-mmarco-100k inferenced on English MS MARCO training queries and passages. The teacher scores can be found in hltcoe/tdist-msmarco-scores.

Training Parameters

• learning rate: 5e-6
• update steps: 200,000
• nway (number of passages per query): 6 (randomly selected from 50; 2 if using round-robin-entires, see below)
• per device batch size (number of query-passage set): 8
• training GPU: 8 NVIDIA V100 with 32 GB memory

Mixing Strategies

• mix-passages: languages are randomly assigned to the 6 sampled passages for a given query during training.
• mix-entries: all passages in the a given query-passage set are randomly assigned to the same language.
• round-robin-entires: for each query, the query-passage set is repeated n times to iterate through all languages.

Usage

To properly load ColBERT-X models from Huggingface Hub, please use the following version of PLAID-X.

pip install PLAID-X>=0.3.1

Following code snippet loads the model through Huggingface API.

from colbert.modeling.checkpoint import Checkpoint
from colbert.infra import ColBERTConfig

Checkpoint('hltcoe/plaidx-large-clef-mtd-round-robin-entries-mt5xxl-engeng', colbert_config=ColBERTConfig())

For full tutorial, please refer to the PLAID-X Jupyter Notebook, which is part of the SIGIR 2023 CLIR Tutorial.

BibTeX entry and Citation Info

Please cite the following two papers if you use the model.

@inproceedings{mtt,
	title = {Neural Approaches to Multilingual Information Retrieval},
	author = {Dawn Lawrie and Eugene Yang and Douglas W Oard and James Mayfield},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)},
	year = {2023},
    doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-28244-7_33},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.01335}
}

@inproceedings{mtd,
	author = {Eugene Yang and Dawn Lawrie and James Mayfield},
	title = {Distillation for Multilingual Information Retrieval},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (Short Paper) (Accepted)},
	year = {2024}
        url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00977}
}