# 100,000+ Movie Reviews from Kazakhstan: Russian, Kazakh, and Code-Switched Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08600/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 9: Overview of Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04277/) (2020)
- [KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19335/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new publicly available corpus of 100,502 movie reviews from Kazakhstan collected from kino.kz, spanning 2001-2025 and covering 4,943 unique titles. The dataset is multilingual, consisting mainly of Russian reviews alongside Kazakh and code-switched texts. Reviews are manually annotated for language and sentiment polarity, and 11,309 reviews additionally contain explicit user-provided ratings. We define two sentiment tasks -- three-way polarity classification and five-class score classification -- and benchmark classical BoW/TF-IDF baselines against multilingual transformer models (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, RemBERT). Experimental results show that transformer models consistently outperform classical baselines on polarity classification, while score classification remains challenging under leakage-controlled evaluation due to severe class imbalance and subtle distinctions between adjacent rating levels.