# Multilingual Multi-Label Emotion Classification at Scale with Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12633/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [AugGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Text Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13007/) (2023)
- [XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12250/) (2021)
- [Emotion Analysis in NLP: Trends, Gaps and Roadmap for Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01222/) (2024)
- [Do Chatbot LLMs Talk Too Much? The YapBench Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00624/) (2026)
- [Open Artificial Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14371/) (2024)
- [Modeling Romanized Hindi and Bengali: Dataset Creation and Multilingual LLM Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22769/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion classification in multilingual settings remains constrained by the scarcity of annotated data: existing corpora are predominantly English, single-label, and cover few languages. We address this gap by constructing a large-scale synthetic training corpus of over 1M multi-label samples (50k per language) across 23 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese, covering 11 emotion categories using culturally-adapted generation and programmatic quality filtering. We train and compare six multilingual transformer encoders, from DistilBERT (135M parameters) to XLM-R-Large (560M parameters), under identical conditions. On our in-domain test set, XLM-R-Large achieves 0.868 F1-micro and 0.987 AUC-micro. To validate against human-annotated data, we evaluate all models zero-shot on GoEmotions (English) and SemEval-2018 Task 1 E-c (English, Arabic, Spanish). On threshold-free ranking metrics, XLM-R-Large matches or exceeds English-only specialist models, tying on AP-micro (0.636) and LRAP (0.804) while surpassing on AUC-micro (0.810 vs. 0.787), while natively supporting all 23 languages. The best base-sized model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/tabularisai/multilingual-emotion-classification