{"ID":6536403,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-14T01:21:01.169441415Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-14T08:33:44.272455028Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10239","arxiv_id":"2607.10239","title":"Multilingual Semantic Retrieval for Apple Music Search","abstract":"Apple Music serves listeners across 150+ storefronts in dozens of languages, with a catalog that grows by hundreds of thousands of new tracks daily. At this scale, search recall on misspelled, transliterated, and cross-lingual queries becomes a dominant driver of session quality, particularly for tail queries that account for the majority of unique queries. We present a multilingual semantic retrieval system built on a 305M-parameter Siamese bi-encoder fine-tuned from GTE-multilingual-base with curriculum-scheduled multi-objective training. The model is integrated into the search stack via a hybrid retrieval architecture that blends dense nearest-neighbor results with the existing token-based index using quantile distribution matching, enabling deployment without retraining downstream rankers. Offline, the model achieves a 69% relative improvement in Hit@10 over GTE-multilingual-base. In a worldwide online A/B test, the system delivers a 2.28% relative conversion-rate (CR) lift overall, an 86% reduction in the no-result rate, and gains across every storefront with no observed regressions. The improvement is concentrated where it is needed most: tail queries see a 7.93% relative CR lift, compared with 0.89% for mid-frequency queries and 0.14% for head queries -- evidence that semantic retrieval improves recall on hard queries without disturbing well-served popular ones. To our knowledge, this is one of the largest search-quality improvements deployed on the platform.","short_abstract":"Apple Music serves listeners across 150+ storefronts in dozens of languages, with a catalog that grows by hundreds of thousands of new tracks daily. At this scale, search recall on misspelled, transliterated, and cross-lingual queries becomes a dominant driver of session quality, particularly for tail queries that acco...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10239","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.10239v1","authors":"[\"Vishalaksh Aggarwal\",\"Kevin Sebastian\",\"Vivek Kanojiya\",\"Leo Le\",\"Nick Tucey\",\"Santosh Shankar\"]","published":"2026-07-11T10:00:48Z","proceeding":"cs.IR","tasks":"[\"cs.IR\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}