Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial to enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yor\`ub\'a) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (The AfriSenti Shared Task had over 200 participants. See website at https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the different datasets and discuss their usefulness.
@article{arxiv.2302.08956,
title = {AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages},
author = {Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Idris Abdulmumin and Abinew Ali Ayele and Nedjma Ousidhoum and David Ifeoluwa Adelani and Seid Muhie Yimam and Ibrahim Sa'id Ahmad and Meriem Beloucif and Saif M. Mohammad and Sebastian Ruder and Oumaima Hourrane and Pavel Brazdil and Felermino Dário Mário António Ali and Davis David and Salomey Osei and Bello Shehu Bello and Falalu Ibrahim and Tajuddeen Gwadabe and Samuel Rutunda and Tadesse Belay and Wendimu Baye Messelle and Hailu Beshada Balcha and Sisay Adugna Chala and Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael and Bernard Opoku and Steven Arthur},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08956},
year = {2023}
}