AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

Africa is home to over 2000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, which consists of 14 sentiment datasets of 110,000+ tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yor\`ub\'a) from four language families annotated by native speakers. The data is used in SemEval 2023 Task 12, the first Afro-centric SemEval shared task. We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and related challenges when curating each of the datasets. We conduct experiments with different sentiment classification baselines and discuss their usefulness. We hope AfriSenti enables new work on under-represented languages. The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023 and can also be loaded as a huggingface datasets (https://huggingface.co/datasets/shmuhammad/AfriSenti).Comment: 15 pages, 6 Figures, 9 Table

UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment analysis for African languages. The challenge faced by this task is the scarcity of labeled data and linguistic resources in low-resource settings. To alleviate these, we propose a generalized multilingual system SACL-XLMR for sentiment analysis on low-resource languages. Specifically, we design a lexicon-based multilingual BERT to facilitate language adaptation and sentiment-aware representation learning. Besides, we apply a supervised adversarial contrastive learning technique to learn sentiment-spread structured representations and enhance model generalization. Our system achieved competitive results, largely outperforming baselines on both multilingual and zero-shot sentiment classification subtasks. Notably, the system obtained the 1st rank on the zero-shot classification subtask in the official ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by SemEval@ACL 202

HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Leveraging African Low Resource TweetData for Sentiment Analysis

We present the findings of SemEval-2023 Task 12, a shared task on sentiment analysis for low-resource African languages using Twitter dataset. The task featured three subtasks; subtask A is monolingual sentiment classification with 12 tracks which are all monolingual languages, subtask B is multilingual sentiment classification using the tracks in subtask A and subtask C is a zero-shot sentiment classification. We present the results and findings of subtask A, subtask B and subtask C. We also release the code on github. Our goal is to leverage low-resource tweet data using pre-trained Afro-xlmr-large, AfriBERTa-Large, Bert-base-arabic-camelbert-da-sentiment (Arabic-camelbert), Multilingual-BERT (mBERT) and BERT models for sentiment analysis of 14 African languages. The datasets for these subtasks consists of a gold standard multi-class labeled Twitter datasets from these languages. Our results demonstrate that Afro-xlmr-large model performed better compared to the other models in most of the languages datasets. Similarly, Nigerian languages: Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba achieved better performance compared to other languages and this can be attributed to the higher volume of data present in the languages

Annotated corpus of mesopotamian-iraqi dialect for sentiment analysis in social media

Research on Sentiment Analysis in social media by using Mesopotamian-Iraqi Dialect (MID) of Arabic language was rarely found, there is no reliable dataset developed in MID neither an annotated corpus for the sentiment analysis of social media in this dialect. Therefore, this gap was the main stumbling block for researchers of sentiment analysis in MID, for this reason, this paper introduced the development of an annotated corpus of Mesopotamian-Iraqi Dialect for sentiment analysis in social media and named it as (ACMID) stands for (the annotated corpus of Mesopotamian-Iraqi Dialect) to help researchers in future for using this corpus for their studies, to the best of our knowledge this is the first annotated corpus that both classify polarity as well as emotion classification in MID. Likewise, Facebook as the most popular social platform among Iraqis was used to extract the data from its popular Iraqi pages. 5000 comments were extracted from these pages classified by its polarity (Positive, Negative, Neutral, Spam) by two Iraqi annotators, these annotators were simultaneously classifying the same comments according to Ekman seven universal emotions (Anger, Fear, Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Contempt) or no emotion. Cohen’s kappa coefficient was then used to compare the two annotators’ results to find the reliability of these results. The data shows a comparable value among the two annotators for the polarity classification as high as 0.82, while for the emotion classification the result was 0.65

A semi-supervised approach for sentiment analysis of arab (ic+ izi) messages: Application to the algerian dialect

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised approach for sentiment analysis of Arabic and its dialects. This approach is based on a sentiment corpus, constructed automatically and reviewed manually by Algerian dialect native speakers. This approach consists of constructing and applying a set of deep learning algorithms to classify the sentiment of Arabic messages as positive or negative. It was applied on Facebook messages written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as well as in Algerian dialect (DALG, which is a low resourced-dialect, spoken by more than 40 million people) with both scripts Arabic and Arabizi. To handle Arabizi, we consider both options: transliteration (largely used in the research literature for handling Arabizi) and translation (never used in the research literature for handling Arabizi). For highlighting the effectiveness of a semi-supervised approach, we carried out different experiments using both corpora for the training (i.e. the corpus constructed automatically and the one that was reviewed manually). The experiments were done on many test corpora dedicated to MSA/DALG, which were proposed and evaluated in the research literature. Both classifiers are used, shallow and deep learning classifiers such as Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression(LR) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long short-term memory (LSTM). These classifiers are combined with word embedding models such as Word2vec and fastText that were used for sentiment classification. Experimental results (F1 score up to 95% for intrinsic experiments and up to 89% for extrinsic experiments) showed that the proposed system outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methodologies (the best improvement is up to 25%)

Sentiment Analysis for the Low-Resourced Latinised Arabic "Arabizi"

The expansion of digital communication mediums from private mobile messaging into the public through social media presented an opportunity for the data science research and industry to mine the generated big data for artificial information extraction. A popular information extraction task is sentiment analysis, which aims at extracting polarity opinions, positive, negative, or neutral, from the written natural language. This science helped organisations better understand the public’s opinion towards events, news, public figures, and products. However, sentiment analysis has advanced for the English language ahead of Arabic. While sentiment analysis for Arabic is developing in the literature of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a popular variety of Arabic, Arabizi, has been overlooked for sentiment analysis advancements. Arabizi is an informal transcription of the spoken dialectal Arabic in Latin script used for social texting. It is known to be common among the Arab youth, yet it is overlooked in efforts on Arabic sentiment analysis for its linguistic complexities. As to Arabic, Arabizi is rich in inflectional morphology, but also codeswitched with English or French, and distinctively transcribed without adhering to a standard orthography. The rich morphology, inconsistent orthography, and codeswitching challenges are compounded together to have a multiplied effect on the lexical sparsity of the language, where each Arabizi word becomes eligible to be spelled in many ways, that, in addition to the mixing of other languages within the same textual context. The resulting high degree of lexical sparsity defies the very basics of sentiment analysis, classification of positive and negative words. Arabizi is even faced with a severe shortage of data resources that are required to set out any sentiment analysis approach. In this thesis, we tackle this gap by conducting research on sentiment analysis for Arabizi. We addressed the sparsity challenge by harvesting Arabizi data from multi-lingual social media text using deep learning to build Arabizi resources for sentiment analysis. We developed six new morphologically and orthographically rich Arabizi sentiment lexicons and set the baseline for Arabizi sentiment analysis on social media

Cross-Lingual and Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis

Identifying sentiment in a low-resource language is essential for understanding opinions internationally and for responding to the urgent needs of locals affected by disaster incidents in different world regions. While tools and resources for recognizing sentiment in high-resource languages are plentiful, determining the most effective methods for achieving this task in a low-resource language which lacks annotated data is still an open research question. Most existing approaches for cross-lingual sentiment analysis to date have relied on high-resource machine translation systems, large amounts of parallel data, or resources only available for Indo-European languages. This work presents methods, resources, and strategies for identifying sentiment cross-lingually in a low-resource language. We introduce a cross-lingual sentiment model which can be trained on a high-resource language and applied directly to a low-resource language. The model offers the feature of lexicalizing the training data using a bilingual dictionary, but can perform well without any translation into the target language. Through an extensive experimental analysis, evaluated on 17 target languages, we show that the model performs well with bilingual word vectors pre-trained on an appropriate translation corpus. We compare in-genre and in-domain parallel corpora, out-of-domain parallel corpora, in-domain comparable corpora, and monolingual corpora, and show that a relatively small, in-domain parallel corpus works best as a transfer medium if it is available. We describe the conditions under which other resources and embedding generation methods are successful, and these include our strategies for leveraging in-domain comparable corpora for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. To enhance the ability of the cross-lingual model to identify sentiment in the target language, we present new feature representations for sentiment analysis that are incorporated in the cross-lingual model: bilingual sentiment embeddings that are used to create bilingual sentiment scores, and a method for updating the sentiment embeddings during training by lexicalization of the target language. This feature configuration works best for the largest number of target languages in both untargeted and targeted cross-lingual sentiment experiments. The cross-lingual model is studied further by evaluating the role of the source language, which has traditionally been assumed to be English. We build cross-lingual models using 15 source languages, including two non-European and non-Indo-European source languages: Arabic and Chinese. We show that language families play an important role in the performance of the model, as does the morphological complexity of the source language. In the last part of the work, we focus on sentiment analysis towards targets. We study Arabic as a representative morphologically complex language and develop models and morphological representation features for identifying entity targets and sentiment expressed towards them in Arabic open-domain text. Finally, we adapt our cross-lingual sentiment models for the detection of sentiment towards targets. Through cross-lingual experiments on Arabic and English, we demonstrate that our findings regarding resources, features, and language also hold true for the transfer of targeted sentiment

Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation

Multilingualism is widespread around the world and code-switching (CSW) is a common practice among different language pairs/tuples across locations and regions. However, there is still not much progress in building successful CSW systems, despite the recent advances in Massive Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs). We investigate the reasons behind this setback through a critical study about the existing CSW data sets (68) across language pairs in terms of the collection and preparation (e.g. transcription and annotation) stages. This in-depth analysis reveals that \textbf{a)} most CSW data involves English ignoring other language pairs/tuples \textbf{b)} there are flaws in terms of representativeness in data collection and preparation stages due to ignoring the location based, socio-demographic and register variation in CSW. In addition, lack of clarity on the data selection and filtering stages shadow the representativeness of CSW data sets. We conclude by providing a short check-list to improve the representativeness for forthcoming studies involving CSW data collection and preparation.Comment: Accepted for EMNLP'23 Findings (to appear on EMNLP'23 Proceedings

Sentiment analysis of dialectical Arabic social media content using a hybrid linguistic-machine learning approach

Despite the enormous increase in the number of Arabic posts on social networks, the sentiment analysis research into extracting opinions from these posts lags behind that for the English language. This is largely attributed to the challenges in processing the morphologically complex Arabic natural language and the scarcity of Arabic NLP tools and resources. This complex task is further exacerbated when analysing dialectal Arabic that do not abide by the formal grammatical structure. Based on the semantic modelling of the target domain’s knowledge and multi-factor lexicon-based sentiment analysis, the intent of this research is to use a hybrid approach, integrating linguistic and machine learning methods for sentiment analysis classification of dialectal Arabic. First, a dataset of dialectal Arabic tweets was collected focusing on the unemployment domain, which is annotated manually. The tweets cover different dialectal Arabic in Saudi Arabia for which a comprehensive Arabic sentiment lexicon was constructed. This approach to sentiment analysis also integrated a novel light stemming mechanism towards improved Saudi dialectal Arabic stemming. Subsequently, a novel multi-factor lexicon-based sentiment analysis algorithm was developed for domain-specific social media posts written in dialectal Arabic. The algorithm considers several factors (emoji, intensifiers, negations, supplications) to improve the accuracy of the classifications. Applying this model to a central problem of sentiment analysis in dialectical Arabic, these operational techniques were deployed in order to assess analytical performance across social media channels which are vulnerable to semantic and colloquial variations. Finally, this study presented a new hybrid approach to sentiment analysis where domain knowledge is utilised in two methods to combine computational linguistics and machine learning; the first method integrates the problem domain semantic knowledgebase in the machine learning training features set, while the second uses the outcome of the lexicon-based sentiment classification in the training of the machine learning methods. By integrating these techniques into a single, hybridised solution, a greater degree of accuracy and consistency was achieved than applying each approach independently, confirming a pragmatic solution to sentiment classification in dialectical Arabic text

Twitter Analysis to Predict the Satisfaction of Saudi Telecommunication Companies’ Customers

The flexibility in mobile communications allows customers to quickly switch from one service provider to another, making customer churn one of the most critical challenges for the data and voice telecommunication service industry. In 2019, the percentage of post-paid telecommunication customers in Saudi Arabia decreased; this represents a great deal of customer dissatisfaction and subsequent corporate fiscal losses. Many studies correlate customer satisfaction with customer churn. The Telecom companies have depended on historical customer data to measure customer churn. However, historical data does not reveal current customer satisfaction or future likeliness to switch between telecom companies. Current methods of analysing churn rates are inadequate and faced some issues, particularly in the Saudi market. This research was conducted to realize the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer churn and how to use social media mining to measure customer satisfaction and predict customer churn. This research conducted a systematic review to address the churn prediction models problems and their relation to Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The findings show that the current churn models lack integrating structural data frameworks with real-time analytics to target customers in real-time. In addition, the findings show that the specific issues in the existing churn prediction models in Saudi Arabia relate to the Arabic language itself, its complexity, and lack of resources. As a result, I have constructed the first gold standard corpus of Saudi tweets related to telecom companies, comprising 20,000 manually annotated tweets. It has been generated as a dialect sentiment lexicon extracted from a larger Twitter dataset collected by me to capture text characteristics in social media. I developed a new ASA prediction model for telecommunication that fills the detected gaps in the ASA literature and fits the telecommunication field. The proposed model proved its effectiveness for Arabic sentiment analysis and churn prediction. This is the first work using Twitter mining to predict potential customer loss (churn) in Saudi telecom companies, which has not been attempted before. Different fields, such as education, have different features, making applying the proposed model is interesting because it based on text-mining