UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysis

Gagan Bhatia, Ife Adebara, Abdelrahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-mageed


Abstract
We describe our contribution to the SemEVAl 2023 AfriSenti-SemEval shared task, where we tackle the task of sentiment analysis in 14 different African languages. We develop both monolingual and multilingual models under a full supervised setting (subtasks A and B). We also develop models for the zero-shot setting (subtask C). Our approach involves experimenting with transfer learning using six language models, including further pretraining of some of these models as well as a final finetuning stage. Our best performing models achieve an F1-score of 70.36 on development data and an F1-score of 66.13 on test data. Unsurprisingly, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of transfer learning and finetuning techniques for sentiment analysis across multiple languages. Our approach can be applied to other sentiment analysis tasks in different languages and domains.
Anthology ID:
2023.semeval-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, A. Seza Doğruöz, Giovanni Da San Martino, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Ritesh Kumar, Elisa Sartori
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
246–255
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gagan Bhatia, Ife Adebara, Abdelrahim Elmadany, and Muhammad Abdul-mageed. 2023. UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 246–255, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysis (Bhatia et al., SemEval 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.33.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.33.mp4