Stance Detection on Nigerian 2023 Election Tweets Using BERT: A Low-Resource Transformer-Based Approach

Mahmoud Ahmad, Habeebah Kakudi


Abstract
This paper investigates stance detection on Nigerian 2023 election tweets by comparing transformer-based and classical machine learning models. A balanced dataset of 2,100 annotated tweets was constructed, and BERT-base-uncased was fine-tuned to classify stances into Favor, Neutral, and Against. The model achieved 98.1% accuracy on an 80/20 split and an F1-score of 96.9% under 5-fold cross-validation. Baseline models such as Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and SVM were also evaluated, with SVM achieving 97.6% F1. While classical methods remain competitive on curated datasets, BERT proved more robust in handling noisy, sarcastic, and ambiguous text, making it better suited for real-world applications in low-resource African NLP contexts.
Anthology ID:
2025.codi-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Michael Strube, Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Amir Zeldes, Chuyuan Li
Venues:
CODI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
54–63
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.codi-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mahmoud Ahmad and Habeebah Kakudi. 2025. Stance Detection on Nigerian 2023 Election Tweets Using BERT: A Low-Resource Transformer-Based Approach. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025), pages 54–63, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stance Detection on Nigerian 2023 Election Tweets Using BERT: A Low-Resource Transformer-Based Approach (Ahmad & Kakudi, CODI 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.codi-1.5.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2025.codi-1.5.SupplementaryMaterial.zip