Damián A. Furman

Juan Manuel Pérez, Mariela Rajngewerc, Juan Carlos Giudici et al.

In recent years, the extraction of opinions and information from user-generated text has attracted a lot of interest, largely due to the unprecedented volume of content in Social Media. However, social researchers face some issues in adopting cutting-edge tools for these tasks, as they are usually behind commercial APIs, unavailable for other languages than English, or very complex to use for non-experts. To address these issues, we present pysentimiento, a comprehensive multilingual Python toolkit designed for opinion mining and other Social NLP tasks. This open-source library brings state-of-the-art models for Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese in an easy-to-use Python library, allowing researchers to leverage these techniques. We present a comprehensive assessment of performance for several pre-trained language models across a variety of tasks, languages, and datasets, including an evaluation of fairness in the results.

Juan Manuel Pérez, Damián A. Furman, Laura Alonso Alemany et al.

Since BERT appeared, Transformer language models and transfer learning have become state-of-the-art for Natural Language Understanding tasks. Recently, some works geared towards pre-training specially-crafted models for particular domains, such as scientific papers, medical documents, user-generated texts, among others. These domain-specific models have been shown to improve performance significantly in most tasks. However, for languages other than English such models are not widely available. In this work, we present RoBERTuito, a pre-trained language model for user-generated text in Spanish, trained on over 500 million tweets. Experiments on a benchmark of tasks involving user-generated text showed that RoBERTuito outperformed other pre-trained language models in Spanish. In addition to this, our model achieves top results for some English-Spanish tasks of the Linguistic Code-Switching Evaluation benchmark (LinCE) and has also competitive performance against monolingual models in English tasks. To facilitate further research, we make RoBERTuito publicly available at the HuggingFace model hub together with the dataset used to pre-train it.