Benchmarking transfer learning approaches for sentiment analysis of Arabic dialect

Abstract

Arabic has a widely varying collection of dialects. With the explosion of the use of social networks, the volume of written texts has remarkably increased. Most users express themselves using their own dialect. Unfortunately, many of these dialects remain under-studied due to the scarcity of resources. Researchers and industry practitioners are increasingly interested in analyzing users’ sentiments. In this context, several approaches have been proposed, namely: traditional machine learning, deep learning transfer learning and more recently few-shot learning approaches. In this work, we compare their efficiency as part of the NADI competition to develop a country-level sentiment analysis model. Three models were beneficial for this sub-task: The first based on Sentence Transformer (ST) and achieve 43.23% on DEV set and 42.33% on TEST set, the second based on CAMeLBERT and achieve 47.85% on DEV set and 41.72% on TEST set and the third based on multi-dialect BERT model and achieve 66.72% on DEV set and 39.69% on TEST set.