Language Concept Erasure for Language-invariant Dense Retrieval

Zhiqi Huang, Puxuan Yu, Shauli Ravfogel, James Allan


Abstract
Multilingual models aim for language-invariant representations but still prominently encode language identity. This, along with the scarcity of high-quality parallel retrieval data, limits their performance in retrieval. We introduce LANCER, a multi-task learning framework that improves language-invariant dense retrieval by reducing language-specific signals in the embedding space. Leveraging the notion of linear concept erasure, we design a loss function that penalizes cross-correlation between representations and their language labels. LANCER leverages only English retrieval data and general multilingual corpora, training models to focus on language-invariant retrieval by semantic similarity without necessitating a vast parallel corpus. Experimental results on various datasets show our method consistently improves over baselines, with extensive analyses demonstrating greater language agnosticism.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.736
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13261–13273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.736
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiqi Huang, Puxuan Yu, Shauli Ravfogel, and James Allan. 2024. Language Concept Erasure for Language-invariant Dense Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13261–13273, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language Concept Erasure for Language-invariant Dense Retrieval (Huang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.736.pdf