On social media, Arabic speakers tend to express themselves in their own local dialect. To do so, Tunisians use ‘Tunisian Arabizi’, where the Latin alphabet is supplemented with numbers. However, annotated datasets for Arabizi are limited; in fact, this challenge uses the only known Tunisian Arabizi dataset in existence.
Sentiment analysis relies on multiple word senses and cultural knowledge, and can be influenced by age, gender and socio-economic status.For this task, we have collected and annotated sentences from different social media platforms. The objective of this challenge is to, given a sentence, classify whether the sentence is of positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. For messages conveying both a positive and negative sentiment, whichever is the stronger sentiment should be chosen. Predict if the text would be considered positive, negative, or neutral (for an average user). This is a binary task.
Such solutions could be used by banking, insurance companies, or social media influencers to better understand and interpret a product’s audience and their reactions.
This competition is one of five NLP challenges we will be hosting on Zindi as part of AI4D’s ongoing African language NLP project, and is a continuation of the African language dataset challenges we hosted earlier this year. You can read more about the work here.
About Icompass (icompass.tn)
iCompass is a Tunisian startup, created in July, 2019 and labelled startup act in August 2019. iCompass is specialized in the Artificial Intelligence field, and more particularly in the Natural Language Processing field. The particularity of iCompass is breaking the language barrier by developing systems that understand and interpret local dialects, especially African and Arab ones.
Read more about iCompass' work and their data here.
About AI4D-Africa; Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (ai4d.ai)
AI4D-Africa is a network of excellence in AI in sub-Saharan Africa. It is aimed at strengthening and developing community, scientific and technological excellence in a range of AI-related areas. It is composed of African Artificial Intelligence researchers, practitioners and policy makers.
This challenge is open to all and not restricted to any country.
Teams and collaboration
You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
Datasets and packages
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.
You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.
If the challenge is a computer vision challenge, image metadata (Image size, aspect ratio, pixel count, etc) may not be used in your submission.
You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.
The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day.
The maximum number of submissions for this competition is 300 overall per user or team.
Before the end of the competition, you need to choose 2 submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection your 2 best public leaderboard submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard.
These models often need to be applied at scale, so large ensembles aren’t encouraged. To incentivise more lightweight solutions, we are adding an additional submission criteria: your submission should take a reasonable time to train and run inference. Specifically, we should be able to re-create your submission on a single-GPU machine (eg Nvidia P100) with less than 8 hours training and two hours inference.
Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 50% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 50% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.
If you are in the top 20 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners.
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.
Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.
These models often need to be applied at scale, so large ensembles aren’t encouraged. Your submission should take a reasonable time to train and run inference. Specifically, we should be able to re-create your submission on a single-GPU machine (eg Nvidia P100) with less than 8 hours training and two hours inference.
Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Reproducibility
Data standards:
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions
The metric for the classification tasks will be Accuracy.
For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: Comment_ID and Label (1:positive, -1: negative, 0: neutral).
Your submission file should look like this:
ID Label
273322 -1
937810 0
23123 1
1st Place: $1 000 USD
2nd Place: $600 USD
3rd Place: $400 USD
Competition closes on 28 March 2021.
Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.