# Large Language Models for Sentiment Analysis to Detect Social Challenges: A Use Case with South African Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17301/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Examining Gender and Race Bias in Two Hundred Sentiment Analysis Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04508/) (2018)
- [Text Classification via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08377/) (2023)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Social Good: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01818/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: An RNN-Based Framework for Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04511/) (2018)
- [Topic-Specific Sentiment Analysis Can Help Identify Political Ideology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12897/) (2018)
- [Native vs Non-Native Language Prompting: A Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07054/) (2024)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05406/) (2019)
- [Lexicon-based Methods vs. BERT for Text Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10097/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning versus Traditional Classifiers on Vietnamese Students' Feedback Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07223/) (2019)
- [Towards A Sentiment Analyzer for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06382/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sentiment analysis can aid in understanding people's opinions and emotions on social issues. In multilingual communities sentiment analysis systems can be used to quickly identify social challenges in social media posts, enabling government departments to detect and address these issues more precisely and effectively. Recently, large-language models (LLMs) have become available to the wide public and initial analyses have shown that they exhibit magnificent zero-shot sentiment analysis abilities in English. However, there is no work that has investigated to leverage LLMs for sentiment analysis on social media posts in South African languages and detect social challenges. Consequently, in this work, we analyse the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art LLMs GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LlaMa 2, PaLM 2, and Dolly 2 to investigate the sentiment polarities of the 10 most emerging topics in English, Sepedi and Setswana social media posts that fall within the jurisdictional areas of 10 South African government departments. Our results demonstrate that there are big differences between the various LLMs, topics, and languages. In addition, we show that a fusion of the outcomes of different LLMs provides large gains in sentiment classification performance with sentiment classification errors below 1%. Consequently, it is now feasible to provide systems that generate reliable information about sentiment analysis to detect social challenges and draw conclusions about possible needs for actions on specific topics and within different language groups.