Lexicon‐based fine‐tuning of multilingual language models for low‐resource language sentiment analysis

Abstract Pre‐trained multilingual language models (PMLMs) such as mBERT and XLM‐R have shown good cross‐lingual transferability. However, they are not specifically trained to capture cross‐lingual signals concerning sentiment words. This poses a disadvantage for low‐resource languages (LRLs) that are under‐represented in these models. To better fine‐tune these models for sentiment classification in LRLs, a novel intermediate task fine‐tuning (ITFT) technique based on a sentiment lexicon of a high‐resource language (HRL) is introduced. The authors experiment with LRLs Sinhala, Tamil and Bengali for a 3‐class sentiment classification task and show that this method outperforms vanilla fine‐tuning of the PMLM. It also outperforms or is on‐par with basic ITFT that relies on an HRL sentiment classification dataset.