NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification
Iyanuoluwa Shode, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, JIng Peng, Anna Feldman
Abstract
Africa has over 2000 indigenous languages but they are under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets. In recent years, there have been progress in developing labelled corpora for African languages. However, they are often available in a single domain and may not generalize to other domains. In this paper, we focus on the task of sentiment classification for cross-domain adaptation. We create a new dataset, Nollywood movie reviews for five languages widely spoken in Nigeria (English, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Yoruba). We provide an extensive empirical evaluation using classical machine learning methods and pre-trained language models. By leveraging transfer learning, we compare the performance of cross-domain adaptation from Twitter domain, and cross-lingual adaptation from English language. Our evaluation shows that transfer from English in the same target domain leads to more than 5% improvement in accuracy compared to transfer from Twitter in the same language. To further mitigate the domain difference, we leverage machine translation from English to other Nigerian languages, which leads to a further improvement of 7% over cross-lingual evaluation. While machine translation to low-resource languages are often of low quality, our analysis shows that sentiment related words are often preserved.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-short.85
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 986–998
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.85
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.85
- Cite (ACL):
- Iyanuoluwa Shode, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, JIng Peng, and Anna Feldman. 2023. NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 986–998, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification (Shode et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.acl-short.85.pdf