  The MS MARCO ranking dataset has been widely used for training deep learning
models for IR tasks, achieving considerable effectiveness on diverse zero-shot
scenarios. However, this type of resource is scarce in languages other than
English. In this work, we present mMARCO, a multilingual version of the MS
MARCO passage ranking dataset comprising 13 languages that was created using
machine translation. We evaluated mMARCO by finetuning monolingual and
multilingual reranking models, as well as a multilingual dense retrieval model
on this dataset. We also evaluated models finetuned using the mMARCO dataset in
a zero-shot scenario on Mr. TyDi dataset, demonstrating that multilingual
models finetuned on our translated dataset achieve superior effectiveness to
models finetuned on the original English version alone. Our experiments also
show that a distilled multilingual reranker is competitive with non-distilled
models while having 5.4 times fewer parameters. Lastly, we show a positive
correlation between translation quality and retrieval effectiveness, providing
evidence that improvements in translation methods might lead to improvements in
multilingual information retrieval. The translated datasets and finetuned
models are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/mMARCO.
