UoB-NLP at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Leveraging Adapters for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Emotion Detection

Frances Adriana Laureano De Leon, Yixiao Wang, Yue Feng, Mark Lee


Abstract
Emotion detection in natural language processing is a challenging task due to the complexity of human emotions and linguistic diversity. While significant progress has been made in high-resource languages, emotion detection in low-resource languages remains underexplored. In this work, we address multilingual and cross-lingual emotion detection by leveraging adapter-based fine-tuning with multilingual pre-trained language models. Adapters introduce a small number of trainable parameters while keeping the pre-trained model weights fixed, offering a parameter-efficient approach to adaptation. We experiment with different adapter tuning strategies, including task-only adapters, target-language-ready task adapters, and language-family-based adapters. Our results show that target-language-ready task adapters achieve the best overall performance, particularly for low-resource African languages with our team ranking 7th for Tigrinya, and 8th for Kinyarwanda. In Track C, our system ranked 5th for Oromo, Tigrinya, Kinyarwanda, Amharic, and Igbo. Our approach outperforms large language models in 11 languages and matches their performance in four others, despite using significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we find that adapter-based models retain cross-linguistic transfer capabilities while requiring fewer computational resources compared to full fine-tuning for each language.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.207
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1570–1576
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.207/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frances Adriana Laureano De Leon, Yixiao Wang, Yue Feng, and Mark Lee. 2025. UoB-NLP at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Leveraging Adapters for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Emotion Detection. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1570–1576, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UoB-NLP at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Leveraging Adapters for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Emotion Detection (Laureano De Leon et al., SemEval 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.207.pdf