A “Cross-Lingual Unified Relevance Model” provides a feedback model that improves a machine-learned ranker for a language with few training resources, using feedback from a more complete ranker for a language that has more training resources. The model focuses on linguistically non-local queries, such as “world cup” (English language/U.S. market) and “copa mundial” (Spanish language/Mexican market), that have similar user intent in different languages and markets or regions, thus allowing the low-resource ranker to receive direct relevance feedback from the high-resource ranker. Among other things, the Cross-Lingual Unified Relevance Model differs from conventional relevancy-based techniques by incorporating both query- and document-level features. More specifically, the Cross-Lingual Unified Relevance Model generalizes existing cross-lingual feedback models, incorporating both query expansion and document re-ranking to further amplify the signal from the high-resource ranker to enable a learning to rank approach based on appropriately labeled training data.