mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

arXiv 2302.08956 ↗First posted 17 Feb 2023cs.CLcited by 68

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial to enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yor`ub'a) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (The AfriSenti Shared Task had over 200 participants. See website at https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the different datasets and discuss their usefulness.

Key facts. Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2023.

Builds on

26 of 69 references.

References · 26

  1. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  2. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
  3. 2021DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharingcited by 1,219
  4. 2021Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotationscited by 306
  5. 2019SMART: Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-trained Natural Language Models through Principled Regularized Optimizationcited by 253
  6. 2016Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Changecited by 219
  7. 2021MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languagescited by 155
  8. 2022Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuningcited by 149
  9. 2019Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learningcited by 143
  10. 2018Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis : A Surveycited by 139
  11. 2021On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasetscited by 123
  12. 2021XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyondcited by 114
14 more
  1. 2020Language ID in the Wild: Unexpected Challenges on the Path to a Thousand-Language Web Text Corpuscited by 76
  2. 2016The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapescited by 69
  3. 2020Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: Current Challenges and New Directions in Sentiment Analysis Researchcited by 67
  4. 2022NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysiscited by 64
  5. 2022Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Gocited by 46
  6. 2013NRC-Canada: Building the State-of-the-Art in Sentiment Analysis of Tweetscited by 33
  7. 2022Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexiconscited by 27
  8. 2014Human language reveals a universal positivity biascited by 23
  9. 2021Ethics Sheet for Automatic Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysiscited by 22
  10. 2021LightTag: Text Annotation Platformcited by 16
  11. 2022MSCTD: A Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Datasetcited by 15
  12. 2021Sentiment Classification in Swahili Language Using Multilingual BERTcited by 6
  13. 2020NLP-CIC at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Analysing sentiment in code-switching language using a simple deep-learning classifiercited by 5
  14. 2019Analysis of the Ethiopic Twitter Dataset for Abusive Speech in Amhariccited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 19; 2024: 15; 2025: 20; 2026: 14.

68 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuningcited by 174
  2. 2023AfroBench: How Good are Large Language Models on African Languages?cited by 43
  3. 2024IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Modelscited by 43
  4. 2023SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)cited by 41
  5. 2023XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languagescited by 34
  6. 2023MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languagescited by 30
  7. 2025BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languagescited by 27
  8. 2024Rehearsal-Free Modular and Compositional Continual Learning for Language Modelscited by 26
  9. 2025NRC VAD Lexicon v2: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 55k English Termscited by 25
  10. 2023Zero- and Few-Shot Prompting with LLMs: A Comparative Study with Fine-tuned Models for Bangla Sentiment Analysiscited by 20
  11. 2024InkubaLM: A small language model for low-resource African languagescited by 18
  12. 2024Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Multi-label Emotion Understandingcited by 17
38 more
  1. 2025Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Aheadcited by 15
  2. 2023NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classificationcited by 14
  3. 2024The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysiscited by 13
  4. 2023HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Languagecited by 12
  5. 2023Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challengescited by 11
  6. 2024Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialectscited by 11
  7. 2024Learning to Route for Dynamic Adapter Composition in Continual Learning with Language Modelscited by 11
  8. 2023NLNDE at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Adaptive Pretraining and Source Language Selection for Low-Resource Multilingual Sentiment Analysiscited by 10
  9. 2025AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languagescited by 10
  10. 2025Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languagescited by 9
  11. 2024Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasetscited by 8
  12. 2024EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluationcited by 8
  13. 2024GrEmLIn: A Repository of Green Baseline Embeddings for 87 Low-Resource Languages Injected with Multilingual Graph Knowledgecited by 7
  14. 2024State of NLP in Kenya: A Surveycited by 7
  15. 2023GradSim: Gradient-Based Language Grouping for Effective Multilingual Trainingcited by 6
  16. 2024Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languagescited by 5
  17. 2024BESSTIE: A Benchmark for Sentiment and Sarcasm Classification for Varieties of Englishcited by 5
  18. 2025Explainable AI: XAI-Guided Context-Aware Data Augmentationcited by 5
  19. 2025AfroXLMR-Social: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for African Languages Social Media Textcited by 4
  20. 2023HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Leveraging African Low Resource TweetData for Sentiment Analysiscited by 3
  21. 2023The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languagescited by 3
  22. 2024How Good is Your Wikipedia? Auditing Data Quality for Low-resource and Multilingual NLPcited by 3
  23. 2025Small Models, Big Impact: Efficient Corpus and Graph-Based Adaptation of Small Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languagescited by 3
  24. 2026Can Embedding Similarity Predict Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Systematic Study on African Languagescited by 3
  25. 2023GMNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis with Phylogeny-Based Adapterscited by 2
  26. 2023UIO at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Multilingual fine-tuning for sentiment classification in low-resource languagescited by 2
  27. 2025RideKE: Leveraging Low-Resource, User-Generated Twitter Content for Sentiment and Emotion Detection in Kenyan Code-Switched Datasetcited by 2
  28. 2025Bridging Gaps in Natural Language Processing for Yor`ub'a: A Systematic Review of a Decade of Progress and Prospectscited by 2
  29. 2025HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processingcited by 2
  30. 2025Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledgecited by 2
  31. 2023DN at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Low-Resource Language Text Classification via Multilingual Pretrained Language Model Fine-tuningcited by 1
  32. 2025Sentiment Analysis on the young people's perception about the mobile Internet costs in Senegalcited by 1
  33. 2025Breaking Bad: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 10k English Multiword Expressionscited by 1
  34. 2026Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Safety in the Global Southcited by 1
  35. 2023Masakhane-Afrisenti at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis using Afro-centric Language Models and Adapters for Low-resource African Languagescited by 0
  36. 2023UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysiscited by 0
  37. 2023KINLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Kinyarwanda Tweet Sentiment Analysiscited by 0
  38. 2023UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysiscited by 0

50 most cited of 68 All 68 (JSON)