| title | MLAIRE: Multilingual Language-Aware Information Retrieval Evaluation Protocal |
|---|---|
| authors | Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Hyeonseok Moon, Heuiseok Lim |
| date | 2026-05-08 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2605.07249 |
| upvotes | 3 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf |
| abstract | Multilingual Information Retrieval is increasingly important in real-world search settings, where users issue queries over mixed-language corpora. Existing evaluations mainly reward language-agnostic semantic relevance, treating relevant passages equally regardless of language. Yet retrieval utility also depends on the language of the retrieved passages: users may prefer results they can read and verify in the query language, and query--passage language mismatch can complicate downstream grounding and answer verification in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. To evaluate this language-aware dimension, we introduce MLAIRE, a Multilingual Language-Aware Information Retrieval Evaluation protocol that disentangles cross-lingual semantic retrieval from query-language preference. MLAIRE constructs controlled pools with parallel passages across languages, enabling measurement of semantic retrieval accuracy and query-language preference when equivalent translations are available. We propose language-aware metrics, including Language Preference Rate (LPR) and Lang-nDCG, together with a 4-way decomposition separating semantic and query-language preference failures. Evaluating 31 dense, sparse, and late-interaction retrievers, we show that standard metrics obscure distinct behaviors: semantically strong retrievers may return correct content in a non-query language, while retrievers with stronger query-language preference may retrieve less semantically relevant passages. |
cite
@misc{jang2026mlaire,
title={MLAIRE: Multilingual Language-Aware Information Retrieval Evaluation Protocal},
author={Youngjoon Jang and Seongtae Hong and Hyeonseok Moon and Heuiseok Lim},
year={2026},
eprint={2605.07249},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07249}
}