Sentiment Analysis Using XLM-R Transformer and Zero-shot Transfer Learning on Resource-poor Indian Language

Abstract

Sentiment analysis on social media relies on comprehending the natural language and using a robust machine learning technique that learns multiple layers of representations or features of the data and produces state-of-the-art prediction results. The cultural miscellanies, geographically limited trending topic hash-tags, access to aboriginal language keyboards, and conversational comfort in native language compound the linguistic challenges of sentiment analysis. This research evaluates the performance of cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and zero-shot transfer learning in projecting predictions from resource-rich English to resource-poor Hindi language. The cross-lingual XLM-RoBERTa classification model is trained and fine-tuned using the English language Benchmark SemEval 2017 dataset Task 4 A and subsequently zero-shot transfer learning is used to evaluate the classification model on two Hindi sentence-level sentiment analysis datasets, namely, IITP-Movie and IITP-Product review datasets. The proposed model compares favorably to state-of-the-art approaches and gives an effective solution to sentence-level (tweet-level) analysis of sentiments in a resource-poor scenario. The proposed model compares favorably to state-of-the-art approaches and achieves an average performance accuracy of 60.93 on both the Hindi datasets.