Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866910892832063488 |
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| author | Ahmad, Ibrahim Said Dudy, Shiran Belay, Tadesse Destaw Abdulmumin, Idris Yimam, Seid Muhie Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan Church, Kenneth |
| author_facet | Ahmad, Ibrahim Said Dudy, Shiran Belay, Tadesse Destaw Abdulmumin, Idris Yimam, Seid Muhie Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan Church, Kenneth |
| contents | Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19642 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages Ahmad, Ibrahim Said Dudy, Shiran Belay, Tadesse Destaw Abdulmumin, Idris Yimam, Seid Muhie Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan Church, Kenneth Computation and Language Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages. |
| title | Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19642 |