---
annotations_creators: []
language_creators: []
language:
- en
license:
- cc-by-sa-4.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
paperswithcode_id: beir
pretty_name: BEIR Benchmark
size_categories:
  msmarco:
  - 1M<n<10M
  trec-covid:
  - 100k<n<1M
  nfcorpus:
  - 1K<n<10K
  nq:
  - 1M<n<10M
  hotpotqa:
  - 1M<n<10M
  fiqa:
  - 10K<n<100K
  arguana:
  - 1K<n<10K
  touche-2020:
  - 100K<n<1M
  cqadupstack:
  - 100K<n<1M
  quora:
  - 100K<n<1M
  dbpedia:
  - 1M<n<10M
  scidocs:
  - 10K<n<100K
  fever:
  - 1M<n<10M
  climate-fever:
  - 1M<n<10M
  scifact:
  - 1K<n<10K
source_datasets: []
task_categories:
- text-retrieval
- zero-shot-retrieval
- information-retrieval
- zero-shot-information-retrieval
task_ids:
- passage-retrieval
- entity-linking-retrieval
- fact-checking-retrieval
- tweet-retrieval
- citation-prediction-retrieval
- duplication-question-retrieval
- argument-retrieval
- news-retrieval
- biomedical-information-retrieval
- question-answering-retrieval
---

# Dataset Card for BEIR Benchmark

## Table of Contents
- [Dataset Description](#dataset-description)
  - [Dataset Summary](#dataset-summary)
  - [Supported Tasks and Leaderboards](#supported-tasks-and-leaderboards)
  - [Languages](#languages)
- [Dataset Structure](#dataset-structure)
  - [Data Instances](#data-instances)
  - [Data Fields](#data-fields)
  - [Data Splits](#data-splits)
- [Dataset Creation](#dataset-creation)
  - [Curation Rationale](#curation-rationale)
  - [Source Data](#source-data)
  - [Annotations](#annotations)
  - [Personal and Sensitive Information](#personal-and-sensitive-information)
- [Considerations for Using the Data](#considerations-for-using-the-data)
  - [Social Impact of Dataset](#social-impact-of-dataset)
  - [Discussion of Biases](#discussion-of-biases)
  - [Other Known Limitations](#other-known-limitations)
- [Additional Information](#additional-information)
  - [Dataset Curators](#dataset-curators)
  - [Licensing Information](#licensing-information)
  - [Citation Information](#citation-information)
  - [Contributions](#contributions)

## Dataset Description

- **Homepage:** https://github.com/UKPLab/beir
- **Repository:** https://github.com/UKPLab/beir
- **Paper:** https://openreview.net/forum?id=wCu6T5xFjeJ
- **Leaderboard:** https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L8aACyPaXrL8iEelJLGqlMqXKPX2oSP_R10pZoy77Ns
- **Point of Contact:** nandan.thakur@uwaterloo.ca

### Dataset Summary

BEIR is a heterogeneous benchmark that has been built from 18 diverse datasets representing 9 information retrieval tasks:

- Fact-checking: [FEVER](http://fever.ai), [Climate-FEVER](http://climatefever.ai), [SciFact](https://github.com/allenai/scifact)
- Question-Answering: [NQ](https://ai.google.com/research/NaturalQuestions), [HotpotQA](https://hotpotqa.github.io), [FiQA-2018](https://sites.google.com/view/fiqa/)
- Bio-Medical IR: [TREC-COVID](https://ir.nist.gov/covidSubmit/index.html), [BioASQ](http://bioasq.org), [NFCorpus](https://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/statnlpgroup/nfcorpus/)
- News Retrieval: [TREC-NEWS](https://trec.nist.gov/data/news2019.html), [Robust04](https://trec.nist.gov/data/robust/04.guidelines.html)
- Argument Retrieval: [Touche-2020](https://webis.de/events/touche-20/shared-task-1.html), [ArguAna](tp://argumentation.bplaced.net/arguana/data)
- Duplicate Question Retrieval: [Quora](https://www.quora.com/q/quoradata/First-Quora-Dataset-Release-Question-Pairs), [CqaDupstack](http://nlp.cis.unimelb.edu.au/resources/cqadupstack/)
- Citation-Prediction: [SCIDOCS](https://allenai.org/data/scidocs)
- Tweet Retrieval: [Signal-1M](https://research.signal-ai.com/datasets/signal1m-tweetir.html)
- Entity Retrieval: [DBPedia](https://github.com/iai-group/DBpedia-Entity/)

All these datasets have been preprocessed and can be used for your experiments.


```python

```

### Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

The dataset supports a leaderboard that evaluates models against task-specific metrics such as F1 or EM, as well as their ability to retrieve supporting information from Wikipedia.

The current best performing models can be found [here](https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/689/leaderboard/).

### Languages

All tasks are in English (`en`).

## Dataset Structure

All BEIR datasets must contain a corpus, queries and qrels (relevance judgments file). They must be in the following format:
- `corpus` file: a `.jsonl` file (jsonlines) that contains a list of dictionaries, each with three fields `_id` with unique document identifier, `title` with document title (optional) and `text` with document paragraph or passage. For example: `{"_id": "doc1", "title": "Albert Einstein", "text": "Albert Einstein was a German-born...."}`
- `queries` file: a `.jsonl` file (jsonlines) that contains a list of dictionaries, each with two fields `_id` with unique query identifier and `text` with query text. For example: `{"_id": "q1", "text": "Who developed the mass-energy equivalence formula?"}`
- `qrels` file: a `.tsv` file (tab-seperated) that contains three columns, i.e. the `query-id`, `corpus-id` and `score` in this order. Keep 1st row as header. For example: `q1 doc1 1`

### Data Instances

A high level example of any beir dataset:

```python
corpus = {
    "doc1" : {
        "title": "Albert Einstein", 
        "text": "Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. who developed the theory of relativity, \
                 one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for \
                 its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy \
                 equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed 'the world's most famous equation'. He received the 1921 \
                 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law \
                 of the photoelectric effect', a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory."
        },
    "doc2" : {
        "title": "", # Keep title an empty string if not present
        "text": "Wheat beer is a top-fermented beer which is brewed with a large proportion of wheat relative to the amount of \
                 malted barley. The two main varieties are German Weißbier and Belgian witbier; other types include Lambic (made\
                 with wild yeast), Berliner Weisse (a cloudy, sour beer), and Gose (a sour, salty beer)."
    },
}

queries = {
    "q1" : "Who developed the mass-energy equivalence formula?",
    "q2" : "Which beer is brewed with a large proportion of wheat?"
}

qrels = {
    "q1" : {"doc1": 1},
    "q2" : {"doc2": 1},
}
```

### Data Fields

Examples from all configurations have the following features:

### Corpus
- `corpus`: a `dict` feature representing the document title and passage text, made up of:
    - `_id`: a `string` feature representing the unique document id
        - `title`: a `string` feature, denoting the title of the document.
        - `text`: a `string` feature, denoting the text of the document.

### Queries
- `queries`: a `dict` feature representing the query, made up of:
    - `_id`: a `string` feature representing the unique query id
    - `text`: a `string` feature, denoting the text of the query.

### Qrels
- `qrels`: a `dict` feature representing the query document relevance judgements, made up of:
    - `_id`: a `string` feature representing the query id
        - `_id`: a `string` feature, denoting the document id.
        - `score`: a `int32` feature, denoting the relevance judgement between query and document.


### Data Splits

| Dataset   | Website| BEIR-Name | Type | Queries  | Corpus | Rel D/Q | Down-load | md5 |
| -------- | -----| ---------| --------- | ----------- | ---------| ---------| :----------: | :------:|
| MSMARCO    | [Homepage](https://microsoft.github.io/msmarco/)| ``msmarco`` | ``train``<br>``dev``<br>``test``|  6,980   |  8.84M     |    1.1 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/msmarco.zip) | ``444067daf65d982533ea17ebd59501e4`` |
| TREC-COVID |  [Homepage](https://ir.nist.gov/covidSubmit/index.html)| ``trec-covid``| ``test``| 50|  171K| 493.5 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/trec-covid.zip) | ``ce62140cb23feb9becf6270d0d1fe6d1`` |
| NFCorpus   | [Homepage](https://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/statnlpgroup/nfcorpus/) | ``nfcorpus`` | ``train``<br>``dev``<br>``test``|  323     |  3.6K     |  38.2 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/nfcorpus.zip) | ``a89dba18a62ef92f7d323ec890a0d38d`` |
| BioASQ     | [Homepage](http://bioasq.org) | ``bioasq``|  ``train``<br>``test`` | 500    |  14.91M    |  8.05 | No | [How to Reproduce?](https://github.com/UKPLab/beir/blob/main/examples/dataset#2-bioasq) |
| NQ         | [Homepage](https://ai.google.com/research/NaturalQuestions) | ``nq``| ``train``<br>``test``| 3,452   |  2.68M  |  1.2 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/nq.zip) | ``d4d3d2e48787a744b6f6e691ff534307`` |
| HotpotQA   | [Homepage](https://hotpotqa.github.io) | ``hotpotqa``| ``train``<br>``dev``<br>``test``|  7,405   |  5.23M  |  2.0 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/hotpotqa.zip)  | ``f412724f78b0d91183a0e86805e16114`` |
| FiQA-2018  | [Homepage](https://sites.google.com/view/fiqa/) | ``fiqa`` | ``train``<br>``dev``<br>``test``|  648     |  57K    |  2.6 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/fiqa.zip)  | ``17918ed23cd04fb15047f73e6c3bd9d9`` |
| Signal-1M(RT) | [Homepage](https://research.signal-ai.com/datasets/signal1m-tweetir.html)| ``signal1m`` | ``test``| 97   |  2.86M  |  19.6 | No | [How to Reproduce?](https://github.com/UKPLab/beir/blob/main/examples/dataset#4-signal-1m) |
| TREC-NEWS  | [Homepage](https://trec.nist.gov/data/news2019.html) | ``trec-news``    | ``test``| 57    |  595K    |  19.6 | No | [How to Reproduce?](https://github.com/UKPLab/beir/blob/main/examples/dataset#1-trec-news) |
| ArguAna    | [Homepage](http://argumentation.bplaced.net/arguana/data) | ``arguana``| ``test`` | 1,406     |  8.67K    |  1.0 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/arguana.zip)  | ``8ad3e3c2a5867cdced806d6503f29b99`` |
| Touche-2020| [Homepage](https://webis.de/events/touche-20/shared-task-1.html) | ``webis-touche2020``| ``test``| 49     |  382K    |  19.0 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/webis-touche2020.zip) | ``46f650ba5a527fc69e0a6521c5a23563`` |
| CQADupstack| [Homepage](http://nlp.cis.unimelb.edu.au/resources/cqadupstack/) | ``cqadupstack``| ``test``| 13,145 |  457K  |  1.4 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/cqadupstack.zip) | ``4e41456d7df8ee7760a7f866133bda78`` |
| Quora| [Homepage](https://www.quora.com/q/quoradata/First-Quora-Dataset-Release-Question-Pairs) | ``quora``| ``dev``<br>``test``| 10,000     |  523K    |  1.6 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/quora.zip) | ``18fb154900ba42a600f84b839c173167`` |
| DBPedia | [Homepage](https://github.com/iai-group/DBpedia-Entity/) | ``dbpedia-entity``| ``dev``<br>``test``| 400    |  4.63M    |  38.2 | [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/dbpedia-entity.zip) | ``c2a39eb420a3164af735795df012ac2c`` |
| SCIDOCS| [Homepage](https://allenai.org/data/scidocs) | ``scidocs``| ``test``| 1,000     |  25K    |  4.9 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/scidocs.zip) | ``38121350fc3a4d2f48850f6aff52e4a9`` |
| FEVER | [Homepage](http://fever.ai) | ``fever``| ``train``<br>``dev``<br>``test``|  6,666     |  5.42M    |  1.2|  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/fever.zip)  | ``5a818580227bfb4b35bb6fa46d9b6c03`` |
| Climate-FEVER| [Homepage](http://climatefever.ai) | ``climate-fever``|``test``|  1,535     |  5.42M |  3.0 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/climate-fever.zip)  | ``8b66f0a9126c521bae2bde127b4dc99d`` |
| SciFact| [Homepage](https://github.com/allenai/scifact) | ``scifact``| ``train``<br>``test``|  300     |  5K    |  1.1 |  [Link](https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/scifact.zip)  | ``5f7d1de60b170fc8027bb7898e2efca1`` |
| Robust04 | [Homepage](https://trec.nist.gov/data/robust/04.guidelines.html) | ``robust04``| ``test``| 249  |  528K  |  69.9 |  No  |  [How to Reproduce?](https://github.com/UKPLab/beir/blob/main/examples/dataset#3-robust04)  |


## Dataset Creation

### Curation Rationale

[Needs More Information]

### Source Data

#### Initial Data Collection and Normalization

[Needs More Information]

#### Who are the source language producers?

[Needs More Information]

### Annotations

#### Annotation process

[Needs More Information]

#### Who are the annotators?

[Needs More Information]

### Personal and Sensitive Information

[Needs More Information]

## Considerations for Using the Data

### Social Impact of Dataset

[Needs More Information]

### Discussion of Biases

[Needs More Information]

### Other Known Limitations

[Needs More Information]

## Additional Information

### Dataset Curators

[Needs More Information]

### Licensing Information

[Needs More Information]

### Citation Information

Cite as:
```
@inproceedings{
thakur2021beir,
title={{BEIR}: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models},
author={Nandan Thakur and Nils Reimers and Andreas R{\"u}ckl{\'e} and Abhishek Srivastava and Iryna Gurevych},
booktitle={Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 2)},
year={2021},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=wCu6T5xFjeJ}
}
```

### Contributions

Thanks to [@Nthakur20](https://github.com/Nthakur20) for adding this dataset.