Ushoshi2023 at BLP-2023 Task 2: A Comparison of Traditional to Advanced Linguistic Models to Analyze Sentiment in Bangla Texts

Abstract

This article describes our analytical approach designed for BLP Workshop-2023 Task-2: in Sentiment Analysis. During actual task submission, we used DistilBERT. However, we later applied rigorous hyperparameter tuning and preprocessing, improving the result to 68% accuracy and a 68% F1 micro score with vanilla LSTM. Traditional machine learning models were applied to compare the result where 75% accuracy was achieved with traditional SVM. Our contributions are a) data augmentation using the oversampling method to remove data imbalance and b) attention masking for data encoding with masked language modeling to capture representations of language semantics effectively, by further demonstrating it with explainable AI. Originally, our system scored 0.26 micro-F1 in the competition and ranked 30th among the participants for a basic DistilBERT model, which we later improved to 0.68 and 0.65 with LSTM and XLM-RoBERTa-base models, respectively.