BanglaNLP at BLP-2023 Task 2: Benchmarking different Transformer Models for Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts

Saumajit Saha, Albert Nanda


Abstract
Bangla is the 7th most widely spoken language globally, with a staggering 234 million native speakers primarily hailing from India and Bangladesh. This morphologically rich language boasts a rich literary tradition, encompassing diverse dialects and language-specific challenges. Despite its linguistic richness and history, Bangla remains categorized as a low-resource language within the natural language processing (NLP) and speech community. This paper presents our submission to Task 2 (Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts) of the BLP Workshop. We experimented with various Transformer-based architectures to solve this task. Our quantitative results show that transfer learning really helps in better learning of the models in this low-resource language scenario. This becomes evident when we further finetuned a model that had already been finetuned on Twitter data for sentiment analysis task and that finetuned model performed the best among all other models. We also performed a detailed error analysis where we found some instances where ground truth labels need to be looked at. We obtained a micro-F1 of 67.02% on the test set and our performance in this shared task is ranked at 21 in the leaderboard.
Anthology ID:
2023.banglalp-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2023)
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Firoj Alam, Sudipta Kar, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Farig Sadeque, Ruhul Amin
Venue:
BanglaLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
266–272
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.banglalp-1.34
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.banglalp-1.34
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saumajit Saha and Albert Nanda. 2023. BanglaNLP at BLP-2023 Task 2: Benchmarking different Transformer Models for Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2023), pages 266–272, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BanglaNLP at BLP-2023 Task 2: Benchmarking different Transformer Models for Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts (Saha & Nanda, BanglaLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.banglalp-1.34.pdf