Witcherses at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Ensemble Learning for African Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes our system submission for SemEval-2023 Task 12 AfriSenti-SemEval: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages. We propose an XGBoost-based ensemble model trained on emoticon frequency-based features and the predictions of several statistical models such as SVMs, Logistic Regression, Random Forests, and BERT-based pre-trained language models such as AfriBERTa and AfroXLMR. We also report results from additional experiments not in the system. Our system achieves a mixed bag of results, achieving a best rank of 7th in three of the languages - Igbo, Twi, and Yoruba.