C3: Continued Pretraining with Contrastive Weak Supervision for Cross Language Ad-Hoc Retrieval

Abstract: Pretrained LLMs have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a LLM with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can further improve retrieval effectiveness. Unlike monolingual retrieval, designing an appropriate auxiliary task for cross-language mappings is challenging. To address this challenge, we use comparable Wikipedia articles in different languages to further pretrain off-the-shelf multilingual pretrained models before fine-tuning on the retrieval task. We show that our approach yields improvements in retrieval effectiveness.