SSNTrio@DravidianLangTech 2025: Sentiment Analysis in Dravidian Languages using Multilingual BERT

AbstractThis paper presents an approach to sentiment analysis for code-mixed Tamil-English and Tulu-English datasets as part of the DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025 shared task. Sentiment analysis, the process of determining the emotional tone or subjective opinion in text, has become a critical tool in analyzing public sentiment on social media platforms. The approach discussed here uses multilingual BERT (mBERT) fine-tuned on the provided datasets to classify sentiment polarity into various predefined categories: for Tulu, the categories were positive, negative, not_tulu, mixed, and neutral; for Tamil, the categories were positive, negative, unknown, mixed_feelings, and neutral. The mBERT model demonstrates its effectiveness in handling sentiment analysis for codemixed and resource-constrained languages by achieving an F1-score of 0.44 for Tamil, securing the 6th position in the ranklist; and 0.56 for Tulu, ranking 5th in the respective task.