Olga Kolesnikova

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

Using code-mixed data in natural language processing (NLP) research currently gets a lot of attention. Language identification of social media code-mixed text has been an interesting problem of study in recent years due to the advancement and influences of social media in communication. This paper presents the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Centro de Investigación en Computación (CIC) team's system description paper for the CoLI-Kanglish shared task at ICON2022. In this paper, we propose the use of a Transformer based model for word-level language identification in code-mixed Kannada English texts. The proposed model on the CoLI-Kenglish dataset achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.84 and a macro F1-score of 0.61.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-trained model achieving a BLEU score of 37.79 in Amharic-English 32.74 in English-Amharic translation. Additionally, we explore the effects of Amharic homophone normalization on the machine translation task. The results show that the normalization of Amharic homophone characters increases the performance of Amharic-English machine translation in both directions.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime et al.

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia. Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers. Our objective is to identify research gaps and disseminate the information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.

Yevhen Kostiuk, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova

In natural language processing (NLP), lexical function is a concept to unambiguously represent semantic and syntactic features of words and phrases in text first crafted in the Meaning-Text Theory. Hierarchical classification of lexical functions involves organizing these features into a tree-like hierarchy of categories or labels. This is a challenging task as it requires a good understanding of the context and the relationships among words and phrases in text. It also needs large amounts of labeled data to train language models effectively. In this paper, we present a dataset of most frequent Spanish verb-noun collocations and sentences where they occur, each collocation is assigned to one of 37 lexical functions defined as classes for a hierarchical classification task. Each class represents a relation between the noun and the verb in a collocation involving their semantic and syntactic features. We combine the classes in a tree-based structure, and introduce classification objectives for each level of the structure. The dataset was created by dependency tree parsing and matching of the phrases in Spanish news. We provide baselines and data splits for each objective.

Yevhen Kostiuk, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Grigori Sidorov et al.

In this paper, we investigate the issue of hate speech by presenting a novel task of translating hate speech into non-hate speech text while preserving its meaning. As a case study, we use Spanish texts. We provide a dataset and several baselines as a starting point for further research in the task. We evaluated our baseline results using multiple metrics, including BLEU scores. The aim of this study is to contribute to the development of more effective methods for reducing the spread of hate speech in online communities.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Mohim Tash et al.

This study performs analysis of Predictive statements, Hope speech, and Regret Detection behaviors within cryptocurrency-related discussions, leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques. We introduce a novel classification scheme named "Prediction statements," categorizing comments into Predictive Incremental, Predictive Decremental, Predictive Neutral, or Non-Predictive categories. Employing GPT-4o, a cutting-edge large language model, we explore sentiment dynamics across five prominent cryptocurrencies: Cardano, Binance, Matic, Fantom, and Ripple. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns in predictive sentiments, with Matic demonstrating a notably higher propensity for optimistic predictions. Additionally, we investigate hope and regret sentiments, uncovering nuanced interplay between these emotions and predictive behaviors. Despite encountering limitations related to data volume and resource availability, our study reports valuable discoveries concerning investor behavior and sentiment trends within the cryptocurrency market, informing strategic decision-making and future research endeavors.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Mohim Tash et al.

The growing prominence of cryptocurrencies has triggered widespread public engagement and increased speculative activity, particularly on social media platforms. This study introduces a novel classification framework for identifying predictive statements in cryptocurrency-related tweets, focusing on five popular cryptocurrencies: Cardano, Matic, Binance, Ripple, and Fantom. The classification process is divided into two stages: Task 1 involves binary classification to distinguish between Predictive and Non-Predictive statements. Tweets identified as Predictive proceed to Task 2, where they are further categorized as Incremental, Decremental, or Neutral. To build a robust dataset, we combined manual and GPT-based annotation methods and utilized SenticNet to extract emotion features corresponding to each prediction category. To address class imbalance, GPT-generated paraphrasing was employed for data augmentation. We evaluated a wide range of machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based models across both tasks. The results show that GPT-based balancing significantly enhanced model performance, with transformer models achieving the highest F1-score in Task 1, while traditional machine learning models performed best in Task 2. Furthermore, our emotion analysis revealed distinct emotional patterns associated with each prediction category across the different cryptocurrencies.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin et al.

Disagreement in annotation is a common phenomenon in the development of NLP datasets and serves as a valuable source of insight. While majority voting remains the dominant strategy for aggregating labels, recent work has explored modeling individual annotators to preserve their perspectives. However, modeling each annotator is resource-intensive and remains underexplored across various NLP tasks. We propose an agreement-based clustering technique to model the disagreement between the annotators. We conduct comprehensive experiments in 40 datasets in 18 typologically diverse languages, covering three subjective NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and hate speech detection. We evaluate four aggregation approaches: majority vote, ensemble, multi-label, and multitask. The results demonstrate that agreement-based clustering can leverage the full spectrum of annotator perspectives and significantly enhance classification performance in subjective NLP tasks compared to majority voting and individual annotator modeling. Regarding the aggregation approach, the multi-label and multitask approaches are better for modeling clustered annotators than an ensemble and model majority vote.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christian Maldonado-Sifuentes, David Alejandro Mendoza Castillo et al.

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook M2M100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The findings show that the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) affects translation performance and that indigenous languages work better when used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and scripts are available at \url{https://github.com/atnafuatx/Machine-Translation-Resources}

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthioEmo, a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely, Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (orm), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with an additional English multi-label emotion dataset from SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our evaluation includes encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only language models. We compare zero and few-shot approaches of LLMs to fine-tuning smaller language models. The results show that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient even for high-resource languages such as English, and there is a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages. The results also show varying performance levels depending on the language and model type. EthioEmo is available publicly to further improve the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt et al.

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.

Melkamu Abay Mersha, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja et al.

Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a powerful tool for improving the performance of AI models, going beyond providing model transparency and interpretability. The scarcity of labeled data remains a fundamental challenge in developing robust and generalizable AI models, particularly for low-resource languages. Conventional data augmentation techniques introduce noise, cause semantic drift, disrupt contextual coherence, lack control, and lead to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose XAI-Guided Context-Aware Data Augmentation. This novel framework leverages XAI techniques to modify less critical features while selectively preserving most task-relevant features. Our approach integrates an iterative feedback loop, which refines augmented data over multiple augmentation cycles based on explainability-driven insights and the model performance gain. Our experimental results demonstrate that XAI-SR-BT and XAI-PR-BT improve the accuracy of models on hate speech and sentiment analysis tasks by 6.6% and 8.1%, respectively, compared to the baseline, using the Amharic dataset with the XLM-R model. XAI-SR-BT and XAI-PR-BT outperform existing augmentation techniques by 4.8% and 5%, respectively, on the same dataset and model. Overall, XAI-SR-BT and XAI-PR-BT consistently outperform both baseline and conventional augmentation techniques across all tasks and models. This study provides a more controlled, interpretable, and context-aware solution to data augmentation, addressing critical limitations of existing augmentation techniques and offering a new paradigm shift for leveraging XAI techniques to enhance AI model training.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Melkamu Mersha, Ananya Kalita et al.

This paper presents the creation of initial bilingual corpora for thirteen very low-resource languages of India, all from Northeast India. It also presents the results of initial translation efforts in these languages. It creates the first-ever parallel corpora for these languages and provides initial benchmark neural machine translation results for these languages. We intend to extend these corpora to include a large number of low-resource Indian languages and integrate the effort with our prior work with African and American-Indian languages to create corpora covering a large number of languages from across the world.

Mikhail Krasitskii, Olga Kolesnikova, Liliana Chanona Hernandez et al.

This study explores transformer-based models such as BERT, mBERT, and XLM-R for multi-lingual sentiment analysis across diverse linguistic structures. Key contributions include the identification of XLM-R superior adaptability in morphologically complex languages, achieving accuracy levels above 88%. The work highlights fine-tuning strategies and emphasizes their significance for improving sentiment classification in underrepresented languages.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Dawit Ketema Gete, Abinew Ali Ayele et al.

In this digital world, people freely express their emotions using different social media platforms. As a result, modeling and integrating emotion-understanding models are vital for various human-computer interaction tasks such as decision-making, product and customer feedback analysis, political promotions, marketing research, and social media monitoring. As users express different emotions simultaneously in a single instance, annotating emotions in a multilabel setting such as the EthioEmo (Belay et al., 2025) dataset effectively captures this dynamic. Additionally, incorporating intensity, or the degree of emotion, is crucial, as emotions can significantly differ in their expressive strength and impact. This intensity is significant for assessing whether further action is necessary in decision-making processes, especially concerning negative emotions in applications such as healthcare and mental health studies. To enhance the EthioEmo dataset, we include annotations for the intensity of each labeled emotion. Furthermore, we evaluate various state-of-the-art encoder-only Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide comprehensive benchmarking.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom et al.

NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Luis Ramos, Zahra Ahani et al.

The advent of social media has transformed communication, enabling individuals to share their experiences, seek support, and participate in diverse discussions. While extensive research has focused on identifying harmful content like hate speech, the recognition and promotion of positive and supportive interactions remain largely unexplored. This study proposes an innovative approach to detecting online social support in Spanish-language social media texts. We introduce the first annotated dataset specifically created for this task, comprising 3,189 YouTube comments classified as supportive or non-supportive. To address data imbalance, we employed GPT-4o to generate paraphrased comments and create a balanced dataset. We then evaluated social support classification using traditional machine learning models, deep learning architectures, and transformer-based models, including GPT-4o, but only on the unbalanced dataset. Subsequently, we utilized a transformer model to compare the performance between the balanced and unbalanced datasets. Our findings indicate that the balanced dataset yielded improved results for Task 2 (Individual and Group) and Task 3 (Nation, Other, LGBTQ, Black Community, Women, Religion), whereas GPT-4o performed best for Task 1 (Social Support and Non-Support). This study highlights the significance of fostering a supportive online environment and lays the groundwork for future research in automated social support detection.

Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Girma Yohannis Bade, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja et al.

Language identification is the task of determining the languages for a given text. In many real world scenarios, text may contain more than one language, particularly in multilingual communities. Bilingual Language Identification (BLID) is the task of identifying and distinguishing between two languages in a given text. This paper presents BLID for languages spoken in the southern part of Ethiopia, namely Wolaita and Gofa. The presence of words similarities and differences between the two languages makes the language identification task challenging. To overcome this challenge, we employed various experiments on various approaches. Then, the combination of the BERT based pretrained language model and LSTM approach performed better, with an F1 score of 0.72 on the test set. As a result, the work will be effective in tackling unwanted social media issues and providing a foundation for further research in this area.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Olga Kolesnikova, Alexander Gelbukh et al.

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT -- a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.

Mikhail Krasitskii, Olga Kolesnikova, Liliana Chanona Hernandez et al.

The sentiment analysis task in Tamil-English code-mixed texts has been explored using advanced transformer-based models. Challenges from grammatical inconsistencies, orthographic variations, and phonetic ambiguities have been addressed. The limitations of existing datasets and annotation gaps have been examined, emphasizing the need for larger and more diverse corpora. Transformer architectures, including XLM-RoBERTa, mT5, IndicBERT, and RemBERT, have been evaluated in low-resource, code-mixed environments. Performance metrics have been analyzed, highlighting the effectiveness of specific models in handling multilingual sentiment classification. The findings suggest that further advancements in data augmentation, phonetic normalization, and hybrid modeling approaches are required to enhance accuracy. Future research directions for improving sentiment analysis in code-mixed texts have been proposed.

Olga Kolesnikova, Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani et al.

The widespread use of social media highlights the need to understand its impact, particularly the role of online social support. This study uses a dataset focused on online social support, which includes binary and multiclass classifications of social support content on social media. The classification of social support is divided into three tasks. The first task focuses on distinguishing between supportive and non-supportive. The second task aims to identify whether the support is directed toward an individual or a group. The third task categorizes the specific type of social support, grouping it into categories such as Nation, LGBTQ, Black people, Women, Religion, and Other (if it does not fit into the previously mentioned categories). To address data imbalances in these tasks, we employed K-means clustering for balancing the dataset and compared the results with the original unbalanced data. Using advanced machine learning techniques, including transformers and zero-shot learning approaches with GPT3, GPT4, and GPT4-o, we predict social support levels in various contexts. The effectiveness of the dataset is evaluated using baseline models across different learning approaches, with transformer-based methods demonstrating superior performance. Additionally, we achieved a 0.4\% increase in the macro F1 score for the second task and a 0.7\% increase for the third task, compared to previous work utilizing traditional machine learning with psycholinguistic and unigram-based TF-IDF values.

Luis Ramos, Hiram Calvo, Olga Kolesnikova

The identification of hope speech has become a promised NLP task, considering the need to detect motivational expressions of agency and goal-directed behaviour on social media platforms. This proposal evaluates traditional machine learning models and fine-tuned transformers for a previously split hope speech dataset as train, development and test set. On development test, a linear-kernel SVM and logistic regression both reached a macro-F1 of 0.78; SVM with RBF kernel reached 0.77, and Naïve Bayes hit 0.75. Transformer models delivered better results, the best model achieved weighted precision of 0.82, weighted recall of 0.80, weighted F1 of 0.79, macro F1 of 0.79, and 0.80 accuracy. These results suggest that while optimally configured traditional machine learning models remain agile, transformer architectures detect some subtle semantics of hope to achieve higher precision and recall in hope speech detection, suggesting that larges transformers and LLMs could perform better in small datasets.

Mikhail Krasitskii, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

Summarization significantly impacts sentiment analysis across languages with diverse morphologies. This study examines extractive and abstractive summarization effects on sentiment classification in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Arabic. We assess sentiment shifts post-summarization using multilingual transformers (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, T5, and BART) and language-specific models (FinBERT, AraBERT). Results show extractive summarization better preserves sentiment, especially in morphologically complex languages, while abstractive summarization improves readability but introduces sentiment distortion, affecting sentiment accuracy. Languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Arabic, experience greater accuracy drops than English or German. Findings emphasize the need for language-specific adaptations in sentiment analysis and propose a hybrid summarization approach balancing readability and sentiment preservation. These insights benefit multilingual sentiment applications, including social media monitoring, market analysis, and cross-lingual opinion mining.

Girma Yohannis Bade, Zahra Ahani, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

The increasing misuse of social media has become a concern; however, technological solutions are being developed to moderate its content effectively. This paper focuses on detecting abusive texts targeting women on social media platforms. Abusive speech refers to communication intended to harm or incite hatred against vulnerable individuals or groups. Specifically, this study aims to identify abusive language directed toward women. To achieve this, we utilized logistic regression and BERT as base models to train datasets sourced from DravidianLangTech@2025 for Tamil and Malayalam languages. The models were evaluated on test datasets, resulting in a 0.729 macro F1 score for BERT and 0.6279 for logistic regression in Tamil and Malayalam, respectively.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

This study delves into the relationship between emotional trends from X platform data and the market dynamics of well-known cryptocurrencies Cardano, Binance, Fantom, Matic, and Ripple over the period from October 2022 to March 2023. Leveraging SenticNet, we identified emotions like Fear and Anxiety, Rage and Anger, Grief and Sadness, Delight and Pleasantness, Enthusiasm and Eagerness, and Delight and Joy. Following data extraction, we segmented each month into bi-weekly intervals, replicating this process for price data obtained from Finance-Yahoo. Consequently, a comparative analysis was conducted, establishing connections between emotional trends observed across bi-weekly intervals and cryptocurrency prices, uncovering significant correlations between emotional sentiments and coin valuations.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) -- Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.