@inproceedings{sani-etal-2025-investigating,
    title = "Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in {H}ausa Language Using {A}fri{BERT}a",
    author = "Sani, Sani Abdullahi  and
      Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan  and
      Jarvis, Devon",
    editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Rayson, Paul  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Gaber, Mohamed  and
      Premasiri, Damith  and
      Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Uyangodage, Lasitha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.loreslm-1.7/",
    pages = "101--111",
    abstract = "Sentiment analysis (SA) plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by identifying sentiments expressed in text. Although significant advances have been made in SA for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages such as Hausa face unique challenges, primarily due to a lack of digital resources. This study investigates the effectiveness of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning (LAFT) to improve SA performance in Hausa. We first curate a diverse, unlabeled corpus to expand the model{'}s linguistic capabilities, followed by applying LAFT to adapt AfriBERTa specifically to the nuances of the Hausa language. The adapted model is then fine-tuned on the labeled NaijaSenti sentiment dataset to evaluate its performance. Our findings demonstrate that LAFT gives modest improvements, which may be attributed to the use of formal Hausa text rather than informal social media data. Nevertheless, the pre-trained AfriBERTa model significantly outperformed models not specifically trained on Hausa, highlighting the importance of using pre-trained models in low-resource contexts. This research emphasizes the necessity for diverse data sources to advance NLP applications for low-resource African languages. We will publish the code and the data set to encourage further research and facilitate reproducibility in low-resource NLP"
}