# HausaMovieReview: A Benchmark Dataset for Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource African Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16256/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BERT-Deep CNN: State-of-the-Art for Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09733/) (2022)
- [HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14311/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for low-resource languages is critically hindered by the scarcity of annotated datasets. This paper addresses this fundamental challenge by introducing HausaMovieReview, a novel benchmark dataset comprising 5,000 YouTube comments in Hausa and code-switched English. The dataset was meticulously annotated by three independent annotators, demonstrating a robust agreement with a Fleiss' Kappa score of 0.85 between annotators. We used this dataset to conduct a comparative analysis of classical models (Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors) and fine-tuned transformer models (BERT and RoBERTa). Our results reveal a key finding: the Decision Tree classifier, with an accuracy and F1-score 89.72% and 89.60% respectively, significantly outperformed the deep learning models. Our findings also provide a robust baseline, demonstrating that effective feature engineering can enable classical models to achieve state-of-the-art performance in low-resource contexts, thereby laying a solid foundation for future research. Keywords: Hausa, Kannywood, Low-Resource Languages, NLP, Sentiment Analysis