Extending Translate-Train for ColBERT-X to African Language CLIR

Abstract

This paper describes the submission runs from the HLTCOE team at the CIRAL CLIR tasks for African languages at FIRE 2023. Our submissions use machine translation models to translate the documents and the training passages, and ColBERT-X as the retrieval model. Additionally, we present a set of unofficial runs that use an alternative training procedure with a similar training setting.