CIRAL at FIRE 2023: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages.

This paper provides a short overview of the CIRAL track at the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) 2023. CIRAL focused on cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) between English and four African languages which include Hausa, Somali, Swahili, and Yoruba. In a bid to promote CLIR research for African languages and curate a test collection for the languages, community evaluations were carried out via pooling. We briefly discuss details of the task, dataset, relevance assessment and results from the track in this paper.