Multilingual Semantic Retrieval for Apple Music Search

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

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 [18] 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.