Cross-Lingual Emotion Recognition in Balinese Text using Multilingual-LLMs under Peer-Collaborations Settings

Putu Kussa Laksana Utama, Tsegaye Misikir Tashu, Jilles Steeve Dibangoye


Abstract
Cross-Lingual Emotion Recognition (CLER) remains a formidable challenge for ultra-low-resource languages like Balinese due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data and the performance limitations of traditional multilingual models. This study addresses these gaps through two primary contributions. First, we present a newly created multi-label Balinese emotion dataset annotated by a panel of experts in Balinese linguistics and psychology. Second, we propose the Multi-Agent Peer Collaboration (MAPC) framework, which transforms the multi-label classification problem into a series of independent binary tasks to leverage the collaborative reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluated the framework against the LaBSE multilingual model and three LLMs of varying scales under zero-shot and few-shot settings using the Macro-F1 measure. The experimental results showed that LLMs significantly outperform traditional Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). MAPC achieved an overall macro F1-score of 63.95, which was higher than the individual baselines in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Analysis shows that while some models exhibit sensitivity to few-shot prompting in low-resource contexts, the MAPC review and revision process consistently improves individual reasoning and provides a more accurate final classification.
Anthology ID:
2026.loreslm-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Alistair Plum, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venue:
LoResLM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
225–238
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.21/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Putu Kussa Laksana Utama, Tsegaye Misikir Tashu, and Jilles Steeve Dibangoye. 2026. Cross-Lingual Emotion Recognition in Balinese Text using Multilingual-LLMs under Peer-Collaborations Settings. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026), pages 225–238, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Lingual Emotion Recognition in Balinese Text using Multilingual-LLMs under Peer-Collaborations Settings (Utama et al., LoResLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.21.pdf