# SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06845/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 119 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [SMART: Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-trained Natural Language Models through Principled Regularized Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03437/) (2019)
- [MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15828/) (2020)
- [Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09096/) (2016)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06487/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis : A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07883/) (2018)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12250/) (2021)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08956/) (2023)
- [Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: Current Challenges and New Directions in Sentiment Analysis Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00357/) (2020)
- [NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08277/) (2022)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 9: Overview of Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04277/) (2020)
- [Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08351/) (2022)
- [TwHIN-BERT: A Socially-Enriched Pre-trained Language Model for Multilingual Tweet Representations at Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07562/) (2022)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11744/) (2022)
- [NRC-Canada: Building the State-of-the-Art in Sentiment Analysis of Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6242/) (2013)
- [KinyaBERT: a Morphology-aware Kinyarwanda Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08459/) (2022)
- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Bactrian-X: Multilingual Replicable Instruction-Following Models with Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15011/) (2023)
- [BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11926/) (2025)
- [InkubaLM: A small language model for low-resource African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17024/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02213/) (2023)
- [HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17690/) (2023)
- [NLNDE at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Adaptive Pretraining and Source Language Selection for Low-Resource Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00090/) (2023)
- [Krey`ol-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05376/) (2024)
- [Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19582/) (2025)
- [CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19567/) (2023)
- [M-ABSA: A Multilingual Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11824/) (2025)
- [EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13737/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource Languages Using a Multilingual Sentiment Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02113/) (2024)
- [GrEmLIn: A Repository of Green Baseline Embeddings for 87 Low-Resource Languages Injected with Multilingual Graph Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18193/) (2024)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)
- [GradSim: Gradient-Based Language Grouping for Effective Multilingual Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15269/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06818/) (2024)
- [HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Leveraging African Low Resource TweetData for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13634/) (2023)
- [The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14557/) (2023)
- [LowResource at BLP-2023 Task 2: Leveraging BanglaBert for Low Resource Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12735/) (2023)
- [Small Models, Big Impact: Efficient Corpus and Graph-Based Adaptation of Small Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10140/) (2025)
- [GMNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis with Phylogeny-Based Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12979/) (2023)
- [UIO at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Multilingual fine-tuning for sentiment classification in low-resource languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14189/) (2023)
- [ANGOFA: Leveraging OFA Embedding Initialization and Synthetic Data for Angolan Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02534/) (2024)
- [RideKE: Leveraging Low-Resource, User-Generated Twitter Content for Sentiment and Emotion Detection in Kenyan Code-Switched Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06180/) (2025)
- [DN at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Low-Resource Language Text Classification via Multilingual Pretrained Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02607/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Topic Classification in X: Dataset and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03075/) (2024)
- [MAGE: Multi-Head Attention Guided Embeddings for Low Resource Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17987/) (2025)
- [UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11256/) (2023)
- [KINLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Kinyarwanda Tweet Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12569/) (2023)
- [UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01093/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge 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 (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.