Exploring Subjective Tasks in Farsi: A Survey Analysis and Evaluation of Language Model

Donya Rooein, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Debora Nozza, Dirk Hovy


Abstract
Given Farsi’s speaker base of over 127 million people and the growing availability of digital text, including more than 1.3 million articles on Wikipedia, it is considered a middle-resource language. However, this label quickly crumbles when the situation is examined more closely. We focus on three subjective tasks (Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Analysis, and Toxicity Detection) and identify significant challenges in data availability and quality, despite overall increases in data availability. We review 110 publications on subjective tasks in Farsi and observe a lack of publicly available datasets. Furthermore, existing datasets often lack essential demographic factors, such as age and gender, that are crucial for accurately modeling subjectivity in language. When evaluating prediction models using the few available datasets, the results are highly unstable across both datasets and models. Our findings show that the volume of data alone is insufficient to improve a language’s standing in NLP.
Anthology ID:
2026.wassa-1.8
Volume:
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Valentin Barriere, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger, Célia Nouri, Debora Nozza, Pranaydeep Singh
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
83–95
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Donya Rooein, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Debora Nozza, and Dirk Hovy. 2026. Exploring Subjective Tasks in Farsi: A Survey Analysis and Evaluation of Language Model. In The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026), pages 83–95, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Subjective Tasks in Farsi: A Survey Analysis and Evaluation of Language Model (Rooein et al., WASSA 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.8.pdf