FIT BUT at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Without Borders - Multilingual Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Sentiment Classification

sentiment analysis, cross-lingual sentiment analysis, domain adaptation, adversarial training, low-resource languages, African languages, transformer, feed-forward neural network

This paper presents our proposed method for SemEval-2023 Task 12, which focuses on sentiment analysis for low-resource African lan- guages. Our method utilizes a language-centric domain adaptation approach which is based on adversarial training, where a small version of Afro-XLM-Roberta serves as a generator model and a feed-forward network as a discriminator. We participated in all three subtasks: monolingual (12 tracks), multilingual (1 track), and zero-shot (2 tracks). Our results show an improvement in weighted F1 for 13 out of 15 tracks with a maximum increase of 4.3 points for Moroccan Arabic compared to the baseline. We observed that using language family-based labels along with sequence-level input representations for the discriminator model improves the quality of the cross-lingual sentiment analysis for the languages unseen during the training. Additionally, our experimental results suggest that training the system on languages that are close in a language families tree enhances the quality of sentiment analysis for low-resource languages. Lastly, the computational complexity of the prediction step was kept at the same level which makes the approach to be interesting from a practical perspective. The code of the approach can be found in our repository.