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

TL;DR

This study explores how Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning improves sentiment analysis in Hausa by adapting AfriBERTa with a curated corpus, showing modest gains and emphasizing the importance of diverse data for low-resource languages.

Contribution

It demonstrates the effectiveness of LAFT on Hausa sentiment analysis and highlights the significance of pre-trained models and diverse datasets for low-resource NLP.

Findings

LAFT provides modest performance improvements.

Pre-trained AfriBERTa outperforms non-Hausa models.

Formal Hausa text limits the effectiveness of LAFT.

Abstract

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