Explainable Pre-Trained Language Models for Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resourced Languages
Sentiment analysis is a crucial tool for measuring public opinion and understanding human communication across digital social media platforms. However, due to linguistic complexities and limited data or computational resources, it is under-represented in many African languages. While state-of-the-ar...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2024-11-01
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| Series: | Big Data and Cognitive Computing |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2504-2289/8/11/160 |
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| Summary: | Sentiment analysis is a crucial tool for measuring public opinion and understanding human communication across digital social media platforms. However, due to linguistic complexities and limited data or computational resources, it is under-represented in many African languages. While state-of-the-art Afrocentric pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been developed for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their applications in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) remain largely unexplored. In this study, we propose a novel approach that combines Afrocentric PLMs with XAI techniques for sentiment analysis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating attention mechanisms and visualization techniques in improving the transparency, trustworthiness, and decision-making capabilities of transformer-based models when making sentiment predictions. To validate our approach, we employ the SAfriSenti corpus, a multilingual sentiment dataset for South African under-resourced languages, and perform a series of sentiment analysis experiments. These experiments enable comprehensive evaluations, comparing the performance of Afrocentric models against mainstream PLMs. Our results show that the Afro-XLMR model outperforms all other models, achieving an average F1-score of 71.04% across five tested languages, and the lowest error rate among the evaluated models. Additionally, we enhance the interpretability and explainability of the Afro-XLMR model using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). These XAI techniques ensure that sentiment predictions are not only accurate and interpretable but also understandable, fostering trust and reliability in AI-driven NLP technologies, particularly in the context of African languages. |
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| ISSN: | 2504-2289 |