This paper describes our system submission for SemEval-2023 Task 12 AfriSenti-SemEval: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages. We propose an XGBoost-based ensemble model trained on emoticon frequency-based features and the predictions of several statistical models such as SVMs, Logistic Regression, Random Forests, and BERT-based pre-trained language models such as AfriBERTa and AfroXLMR. We also report results from additional experiments not in the system. Our system achieves a mixed bag of results, achieving a best rank of 7th in three of the languages - Igbo, Twi, and Yoruba.

This paper describes SimpleNER, a model developed for the sentence simplification task at GEM-2021. Our system is a monolingual Seq2Seq Transformer architecture that uses control tokens pre-pended to the data, allowing the model to shape the generated simplifications according to user desired attributes. Additionally, we show that NER-tagging the training data before use helps stabilize the effect of the control tokens and significantly improves the overall performance of the system. We also employ pretrained embeddings to reduce data sparsity and allow the model to produce more generalizable outputs.