We address hyperbole detection as a binary classification task, comparing rule-based methods, fine-tuned transformers (BERT, RoBERTa), and large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot and few-shot prompting (Gemini, LLaMA). Fine-tuned transformers achieved the best overall performance, with RoBERTa attaining an F1-score of 0.82. Rule-based methods performed lower (F1 = 0.58) but remain effective in constrained linguistic contexts. LLMs showed mixed results: zero-shot performance was variable, while few-shot prompting notably improved outcomes, reaching F1-scores up to 0.79 without task-specific training data. We discuss the trade-offs between interpretability, computational cost, and data requirements across methods. Our results highlight the promise of LLMs in low-resource scenarios and suggest future work on hybrid models and broader figurative language tasks.

This article introduces SM-FEEL-BG – the first Bulgarian-language package, containing 6 datasets with Social Media (SM) texts with emotion, feeling, and sentiment labels and 4 classifiers trained on them. All but one dataset from these are freely accessible for research purposes. The largest dataset contains 6000 Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook texts, manually annotated with 21 fine-grained emotion/feeling categories. The fine-grained labels are automatically merged into three coarse-grained sentiment categories, producing a dataset with two parallel sets of labels. Several classification experiments are run on different subsets of the fine-grained categories and their respective sentiment labels with a Bulgarian fine-tuned BERT. The highest Acc. reached was 0.61 for 16 emotions and 0.70 for 11 emotions (incl. 310 ChatGPT 4-generated texts). The sentiments Acc. of the 11 emotions dataset was also the highest (0.79). As Facebook posts cannot be shared, we ran experiments on the Twitter and Telegram subset of the 11 emotions dataset, obtaining 0.73 Acc. for emotions and 0.80 for sentiments. The article describes the annotation procedures, guidelines, experiments, and results. We believe that this package will be of significant benefit to researchers working on emotion detection and sentiment analysis in Bulgarian.