metadata

dataset_info:
  - config_name: docs
    features:
      - name: docid
        dtype: string
      - name: title
        dtype: string
      - name: subtitle
        dtype: string
      - name: abstract
        dtype: string
    splits:
      - name: fr.test
        num_bytes: 21532392
        num_examples: 16389
      - name: en.test
        num_bytes: 19436528
        num_examples: 16389
    download_size: 22803206
    dataset_size: 40968920
  - config_name: qrels
    features:
      - name: qid
        dtype: int64
      - name: docid
        dtype: string
      - name: rel
        dtype: int64
    splits:
      - name: en_fr.test
        num_bytes: 10393138
        num_examples: 360596
      - name: en_en.test
        num_bytes: 10393138
        num_examples: 360596
    download_size: 5660924
    dataset_size: 20786276
  - config_name: queries
    features:
      - name: qid
        dtype: int64
      - name: query
        dtype: string
    splits:
      - name: en.test
        num_bytes: 20056464
        num_examples: 357710
    download_size: 7709798
    dataset_size: 20056464
configs:
  - config_name: docs
    data_files:
      - split: fr.test
        path: docs/fr.test-*
      - split: en.test
        path: docs/en.test-*
  - config_name: qrels
    data_files:
      - split: en_fr.test
        path: qrels/en_fr.test-*
      - split: en_en.test
        path: qrels/en_en.test-*
  - config_name: queries
    data_files:
      - split: en.test
        path: queries/en.test-*
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
multilinguality:
  - multilingual
  - translation
task_categories:
  - text-retrieval
task_ids:
  - document-retrieval
language:
  - en
  - fr
pretty_name: CLIRudit
source_datasets:
  - original
tags:
  - research papers

Dataset Card for CLIRudit

CLIRudit is a dataset for academic Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), consisting of English queries and French documents, based on Érudit, a non-profit publishing platform based in Quebec, Canada.

The CLIRudit dataset follows a TREC-style structure with three main components:

Queries: Generated from English keywords of research articles by creating all possible three-keyword combinations. For example, an article with keywords {A, B, C, D} would generate four queries: "A, B, C", "A, B, D", "A, C, D", and "B, C, D".
Relevance judgments (qrels): A document is considered relevant to a query if its English keywords metadata contains all keywords present in the query, reflecting the assumption that authors want their articles to be discoverable through these keywords.
Document collection: Each document consists of concatenated French title, subtitle, and abstract, which serves as the retrieval unit.

The dataset includes only Érudit research articles containing both abstracts and keywords in both French and English. The translations between languages were provided by the original authors of the articles.

As an empirical upper bound, we also include the actual English translations of the French titles, subtitles, and abstracts as documents. This represents the best possible performance that can be achieved by a retrieval method with perfect translation.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

Language(s) (NLP): English, French
License: CC BY-NC 4.0. The dataset should not be used for any commercial purpose.

Dataset Sources

Repository: TBA
Paper: CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents

Uses

The dataset is meant to be used to evaluate cross-lingual IR models.

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

A typical instance of the docs subset looks like:

{
  'docid': '000200ar',
  'title': 'Le charme féminin chez les Peuls Djeneri du Mali',
  'subtitle': 'Un « objet » de la nature ou de la culture?',
  'abstract': 'La notion de charme soulève une confusion de sens, car elle est souvent utilisée dans un sens commun...',
}

A typical instance of the queries subset looks like:

{
  'qid': 0,
  'query': '"biblioclasts", books with holes, picture books'
}

A typical instance of the qrels subset looks like:

{
  'qid': 0,
  'docid': '1089655ar',
  'rel': 1
}

Data Fields

qid: query id
query: query text
docid: document id in Érudit
title: article title, if any
subtitle: article subtitle, if any
abstract: article abstract
rel: relevance label (currently only positives are labelled with 1)

Data Splits

There is one subset per dataset component (documents, queries, qrels). split is used to represent language and train/test split.

For qrels, we first indicate query lang and then doc lang in the split name; e.g., en_fr.test means test split judgments with English queries and French documents.

Citation

BibTeX:

@article{valentini2025clirudit,
  title={CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents}, 
  author={Francisco Valentini and Diego Kozlowski and Vincent Larivière},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2504.16264},
  journal={arxiv:2504.16264},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.IR},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16264}, 
}

APA:

Francisco Valentini, Diego Kozlowski, & Vincent Larivière (2025). CLIRudit: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval of Scientific Documents. arxiv:2504.16264.