Evaluation of Pretrained and Instruction-Based Pretrained Models for Emotion Detection in Arabic Social Media Text

Md. Rafiul Biswas, Shimaa Ibrahim, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Wajdi Zaghouani


Abstract
This study evaluates three approaches—instruction prompting of large language models (LLMs), instruction fine-tuning of LLMs, and transformer-based pretrained models on emotion detection in Arabic social media text. We compare pretrained transformer models like AraBERT, CaMelBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa with instruction prompting with advanced LLMs like GPT-4o, Gemini, Deepseek, and Fanar, and instruction fine-tuning approaches with LLMs like Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Phi. With a highly preprocessed dataset of 10,000 labeled Arabic tweets with overlapping emotional labels, our findings reveal that transformer-based pretrained models outperform instruction prompting and instruction fine-tuning approaches. Instruction prompts leverage general linguistic skills with maximum efficiency but fall short in detecting subtle emotional contexts. Instruction fine-tuning is more specific but trails behind pretrained transformer models. Our findings establish the need for optimized instruction-based approaches and underscore the important role played by domain-specific transformer architectures in accurate Arabic emotion detection.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
158–165
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.19/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md. Rafiul Biswas, Shimaa Ibrahim, Mabrouka Bessghaier, and Wajdi Zaghouani. 2025. Evaluation of Pretrained and Instruction-Based Pretrained Models for Emotion Detection in Arabic Social Media Text. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 158–165, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of Pretrained and Instruction-Based Pretrained Models for Emotion Detection in Arabic Social Media Text (Biswas et al., RANLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.19.pdf