Abstract
While sentiment classification has been considered a practically solved task for high-resource languages such as English, the scarcity of data for many languages still makes it a challenging task. The AfriSenti-SemEval shared task aims to classify sentiment on Twitter data for 14 low-resource African languages. In our participation, we focus on Nigerian Pidgin as the target language. We have investigated the effect of English monolingual and multilingual pre-trained models on the sentiment classification task for Nigerian Pidgin. Our setup includes zero-shot models (using English, Igbo and Hausa data) and a Nigerian Pidgin fine-tuned model. Our results show that English fine-tuned models perform slightly better than models fine-tuned on other Nigerian languages, which could be explained by the lexical and structural closeness between Nigerian Pidgin and English. The best results were reported on the monolingual Nigerian Pidgin data. The model pre-trained on English and fine-tuned on Nigerian Pidgin was submitted to Task A Track 4 of the AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12, and scored 25 out of 32 in the ranking.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.semeval-1.205
- 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:
- 1491–1497
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.205
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.205
- Cite (ACL):
- Annika Kniele and Meriem Beloucif. 2023. Uppsala University at SemEval-2023 Task12: Zero-shot Sentiment Classification for Nigerian Pidgin Tweets. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 1491–1497, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Uppsala University at SemEval-2023 Task12: Zero-shot Sentiment Classification for Nigerian Pidgin Tweets (Kniele & Beloucif, SemEval 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.semeval-1.205.pdf