Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in Hausa Language Using AfriBERTa

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sani, Sani Abdullahi, Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan, Jarvis, Devon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Sani, Sani Abdullahi
Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan
Jarvis, Devon
author_facet Sani, Sani Abdullahi
Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan
Jarvis, Devon
contents 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 published the code and the dataset to encourage further research and facilitate reproducibility in low-resource NLP here: https://github.com/Sani-Abdullahi-Sani/Natural-Language-Processing/blob/main/Sentiment%20Analysis%20for%20Low%20Resource%20African%20Languages
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_11023
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in Hausa Language Using AfriBERTa
Sani, Sani Abdullahi
Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan
Jarvis, Devon
Computation and Language
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 published the code and the dataset to encourage further research and facilitate reproducibility in low-resource NLP here: https://github.com/Sani-Abdullahi-Sani/Natural-Language-Processing/blob/main/Sentiment%20Analysis%20for%20Low%20Resource%20African%20Languages
title Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in Hausa Language Using AfriBERTa
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11023