The BEIR dataset is a large, heterogeneous benchmark for Information Retrieval (IR), garnering considerable attention within the research community. However, BEIR and analogous datasets are predominantly restricted to English language. Our objective is to establish extensive large-scale resources for IR in the Polish language, thereby advancing the research in this NLP area. In this work, inspired by mMARCO and Mr. TyDi datasets, we translated all accessible open IR datasets into Polish, and we introduced the BEIR-PL benchmark – a new benchmark which comprises 13 datasets, facilitating further development, training and evaluation of modern Polish language models for IR tasks. We executed an evaluation and comparison of numerous IR models on the newly introduced BEIR-PL benchmark. Furthermore, we publish pre-trained open IR models for Polish language, marking a pioneering development in this field. The BEIR-PL is included in MTEB Benchmark and also available with trained models at URL https://huggingface.co/clarin-knext.

Data augmentation is a difficult task in Natural Language Processing. Simple methods that can be relatively easily applied in other domains like insertion, deletion or substitution, mostly result in changing the sentence meaning significantly and obtaining an incorrect example. Wordnets are potentially a perfect source of rich and high quality data that when integrated with the powerful capacity of generative models can help to solve this complex task. In this work, we use plWordNet, which is a wordnet of the Polish language, to explore the capability of encoder-decoder architectures in data augmentation of sense glosses. We discuss the limitations of generative methods and perform qualitative review of generated data samples.