ElyKok/hebrew-qa-retriever-e5-base

Hebrew QA Retriever (fine-tuned multilingual-e5-base)

Retrieves the Hebrew paragraph that answers a Hebrew question. Fine-tuned from intfloat/multilingual-e5-base on the answerable questions of HeQ, with mined hard negatives and CachedMultipleNegativesRankingLoss (batch 128, 2 epochs, lr 2e-05).

Usage

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("ElyKok/hebrew-qa-retriever-e5-base")
q = model.encode("query: מי ניסח את מגילת העצמאות?", normalize_embeddings=True)
p = model.encode(["passage: ..."], normalize_embeddings=True)

Use the query: and passage: prefixes, as with the base model.

Results (HeQ test set, 1,072 questions, search over all 4,930 paragraphs)

Model	R@1	R@5	R@10	MRR@10	NDCG@10	R@5 Wikipedia	R@5 Geektime
BM25 (keyword search)	73.1	86.8	89.8	79	81.7	91.2	82.2
multilingual-e5-base	67.4	81.7	86.2	73.4	76.5	86.2	77
multilingual-e5-large	72.7	87.8	91.4	79.2	82.2	90.8	84.6
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B	55.4	70.6	76.3	62.2	65.6	74.3	66.8
Fine-tuned e5-base (ours)	67.3	82.8	86.5	74.1	77.1	87	78.6

Test articles are disjoint from training articles. HeQ is licensed CC BY 4.0 (Webiks / MAFAT). Limitation: HeQ questions were written while looking at the paragraph, so they share more wording with it than real user queries would.