Dear Colleagues,

Apologies for cross-posting.

We are glad to announce the first SemEval shared task targeting African low-resource languages, AfriSenti-SemEval, Task 12. The AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12 is based on a collection of humanly annotated Twitter datasets in 16 African languages (all low resource) for sentiment classification. This year, we have three sub-tasks, from which the participants can choose one or more tasks depending on their preference.

Task A: Monolingual Sentiment Classification

Given training data in a target language, determine the polarity of a tweet in the target language (positive, negative, or neutral). If a tweet For messages conveying both a positive and negative sentiment, whichever is the stronger sentiment should be chosen. This sub-task covers 13 languages namely, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Nigerian_Pidgin, Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Kinyarwanda, Twi, Mozambican Portuguese, Swahili, Setswana, isiZulu, Moroccan Arabic/Darija.

Task B: Multilingual Sentiment Classification

Given combined training data from 13 African languages, determine the polarity of a tweet in the target language (positive, negative, or neutral).

Task C: Zero-Shot Sentiment Classification

Given unlabeled tweets in three African languages (Oromo, Tigrinya, and Xithonga), leverage any or all of the available training datasets in Subtasks A and B to determine the sentiment of a tweet in the two target languages is positive, negative, or neutral.

Helpful Links:

-

Competition: https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/7320 -

AfriSenti: https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io/ -

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfriSenti2023 https://twitter.com/AfriSenti2023

Prize:

The afriSenti-SemEval competition has a prize and will be awarded to the best performing team in each of the three sub-tasks.

-

African League: To encourage African participation, this league is for teams with at least one African. -

Master's and Undergraduate League: This league is dedicated to master and undergraduate students only. -

Worldwide League: Be a participant from any country.

Important Dates:

-

Training data ready - 11 September 2022 -

Evaluation Starts - 10 January 2023 -

Evaluation End - 31 January 2023 -

System Description Paper Due - February 2023 -

SemEval workshop Summer 2023 - (co-located with a major NLP conference)

Task Organizers:

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Sa’id, Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Abinew Ali Ayele, Vukosi Marivate, Sebastian Ruder, Saif M. Mohammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Meriem Beloucif, Tadesse Destaw Belay