DimABSA: Building Multilingual and Multidomain Datasets for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) focuses on extracting sentiment at a fine-grained aspect level and has been widely applied across real-world domains. However, existing ABSA research relies on coarse-grained categorical labels (e.g., positive, negative), which limits its ability to capture nuanced affective states. To address this limitation, we adopt a dimensional approach that represents sentiment with continuous valence-arousal (VA) scores, enabling fine-grained analysis at both the aspect and sentiment levels. To this end, we introduce DimABSA, the first multilingual, dimensional ABSA resource annotated with both traditional ABSA elements (aspect terms, aspect categories, and opinion terms) and newly introduced VA scores. This resource contains 76,958 aspect instances across 42,590 sentences, spanning six languages and four domains. We further introduce three subtasks that combine VA scores with different ABSA elements, providing a bridge from traditional ABSA to dimensional ABSA. Given that these subtasks involve both categorical and continuous outputs, we propose a new unified metric, continuous F1 (cF1), which incorporates VA prediction error into standard F1. We provide a comprehensive benchmark using both prompted and fine-tuned large language models across all subtasks. Our results show that DimABSA is a challenging benchmark and provides a foundation for advancing multilingual dimensional ABSA.

DimStance: Multilingual Datasets for Dimensional Stance Analysis

Stance detection is an established task that classifies an author's attitude toward a specific target into categories such as Favor, Neutral, and Against. Beyond categorical stance labels, we leverage a long-established affective science framework to model stance along real-valued dimensions of valence (negative-positive) and arousal (calm-active). This dimensional approach captures nuanced affective states underlying stance expressions, enabling fine-grained stance analysis. To this end, we introduce DimStance, the first dimensional stance resource with valence-arousal (VA) annotations. This resource comprises 11,746 target aspects in 7,365 texts across five languages (English, German, Chinese, Nigerian Pidgin, and Swahili) and two domains (politics and environmental protection). To facilitate the evaluation of stance VA prediction, we formulate the dimensional stance regression task, analyze cross-lingual VA patterns, and benchmark pretrained and large language models under regression and prompting settings. Results show competitive performance of fine-tuned LLM regressors, persistent challenges in low-resource languages, and limitations of token-based generation. DimStance provides a foundation for multilingual, emotion-aware, stance analysis and benchmarking.

CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data often used to train multilingual language models. In this paper, we introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. Many of the included languages have been previously under-served, making CommonLID a key resource for developing more representative high-quality text corpora. We show CommonLID's value by using it, alongside five other common evaluation sets, to test eight popular LID models. We analyse our results to situate our contribution and to provide an overview of the state of the art. In particular, we highlight that existing evaluations overestimate LID accuracy for many languages in the web domain. We make CommonLID and the code used to create it available under an open, permissive license.

PingPong: A Natural Benchmark for Multi-Turn Code-Switching Dialogues

Code-switching is a widespread practice among the world's multilingual majority, yet few benchmarks accurately reflect its complexity in everyday communication. We present PingPong, a benchmark for natural multi-party code-switching dialogues covering five language-combination variations, some of which are trilingual. Our dataset consists of human-authored conversations among 2 to 4 participants covering authentic, multi-threaded structures where replies frequently reference much earlier points in the dialogue. We demonstrate that our data is significantly more natural and structurally diverse than machine-generated alternatives, offering greater variation in message length, speaker dominance, and reply distance. Based on these dialogues, we define three downstream tasks: Question Answering, Dialogue Summarization, and Topic Classification. Evaluations of several state-of-the-art language models on PingPong reveal that performance remains limited on code-switched inputs, underscoring the urgent need for more robust NLP systems capable of addressing the intricacies of real-world multilingual discourse.

POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization

Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and multievent dataset with over 23k instances in seven languages from diverse online platforms and real-world events. Polarization is annotated along three axes: presence, type, and manifestation, using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. We conduct two main experiments: (1) we fine-tune six multilingual pretrained language models in both monolingual and cross-lingual setups; and (2) we evaluate a range of open and closed large language models (LLMs) in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Results show that while most models perform well on binary polarization detection, they achieve substantially lower scores when predicting polarization types and manifestations. These findings highlight the complex, highly contextual nature of polarization and the need for robust, adaptable approaches in NLP and computational social science. All resources will be released to support further research and effective mitigation of digital polarization globally.

HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processing

Hausa Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained increasing attention in recent years, yet remains understudied as a low-resource language despite having over 120 million first-language (L1) and 80 million second-language (L2) speakers worldwide. While significant advances have been made in high-resource languages, Hausa NLP faces persistent challenges, including limited open-source datasets and inadequate model representation. This paper presents an overview of the current state of Hausa NLP, systematically examining existing resources, research contributions, and gaps across fundamental NLP tasks: text classification, machine translation, named entity recognition, speech recognition, and question answering. We introduce HausaNLP (https://catalog.hausanlp.org), a curated catalog that aggregates datasets, tools, and research works to enhance accessibility and drive further development. Furthermore, we discuss challenges in integrating Hausa into large language models (LLMs), addressing issues of suboptimal tokenization and dialectal variation. Finally, we propose strategic research directions emphasizing dataset expansion, improved language modeling approaches, and strengthened community collaboration to advance Hausa NLP. Our work provides both a foundation for accelerating Hausa NLP progress and valuable insights for broader multilingual NLP research.

Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study investigates the major challenges hindering the development of ASR systems for these languages, which include data scarcity, linguistic complexity, limited computational resources, acoustic variability, and ethical concerns surrounding bias and privacy. The primary goal is to critically analyze these barriers and identify practical, inclusive strategies to advance ASR technologies within the African context. Recent advances and case studies emphasize promising strategies such as community-driven data collection, self-supervised and multilingual learning, lightweight model architectures, and techniques that prioritize privacy. Evidence from pilot projects involving various African languages showcases the feasibility and impact of customized solutions, which encompass morpheme-based modeling and domain-specific ASR applications in sectors like healthcare and education. The findings highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and sustained investment to tackle the distinct linguistic and infrastructural challenges faced by the continent. This study offers a progressive roadmap for creating ethical, efficient, and inclusive ASR systems that not only safeguard linguistic diversity but also improve digital accessibility and promote socioeconomic participation for speakers of African languages.

Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages

Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages.

HausaNLP at SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Fine-tuning vs. Prompt Engineering in Entity-Aware Machine Translation

This paper presents our findings for SemEval 2025 Task 2, a shared task on entity-aware machine translation (EA-MT). The goal of this task is to develop translation models that can accurately translate English sentences into target languages, with a particular focus on handling named entities, which often pose challenges for MT systems. The task covers 10 target languages with English as the source. In this paper, we describe the different systems we employed, detail our results, and discuss insights gained from our experiments.

Who Wrote This? Identifying Machine vs Human-Generated Text in Hausa

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has allowed them to be proficient in various tasks, including content generation. However, their unregulated usage can lead to malicious activities such as plagiarism and generating and spreading fake news, especially for low-resource languages. Most existing machine-generated text detectors are trained on high-resource languages like English, French, etc. In this study, we developed the first large-scale detector that can distinguish between human- and machine-generated content in Hausa. We scrapped seven Hausa-language media outlets for the human-generated text and the Gemini-2.0 flash model to automatically generate the corresponding Hausa-language articles based on the human-generated article headlines. We fine-tuned four pre-trained Afri-centric models (AfriTeVa, AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, and AfroXLMR-76L) on the resulting dataset and assessed their performance using accuracy and F1-score metrics. AfroXLMR achieved the highest performance with an accuracy of 99.23% and an F1 score of 99.21%, demonstrating its effectiveness for Hausa text detection. Our dataset is made publicly available to enable further research.