roman-urdu-sentiment-distilbert

Roman Urdu Sentiment Analysis

A fine-tuned DistilBERT model that classifies Roman Urdu text (Urdu written in Latin script) into three sentiment categories: Positive, Negative, or Neutral.

Model Description

This model fine-tunes distilbert-base-uncased on a dataset of Roman Urdu sentences to perform sentiment classification. Roman Urdu presents unique NLP challenges due to inconsistent spelling, informal grammar, and lack of standardized script — making sentiment analysis on it a genuinely hard task compared to standard English NLP.

Training Details

• Base model: distilbert-base-uncased
• Dataset: community-datasets/roman_urdu (20,229 examples)
• Train/test split: 80/20 (16,183 / 4,046)
• Epochs: 3
• Learning rate: 2e-5
• Batch size: 16
• Max sequence length: 64 tokens

Evaluation Results

Usage

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("YOUR_USERNAME/roman-urdu-sentiment-distilbert")
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("YOUR_USERNAME/roman-urdu-sentiment-distilbert")

text = "yeh bohat acha hai"
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=64)
outputs = model(**inputs)
prediction = torch.argmax(outputs.logits, dim=-1).item()

labels = ["Positive", "Negative", "Neutral"]
print(labels[prediction])

Limitations

• Performance reflects the inherent difficulty of informal, non-standardized Roman Urdu text
• Neutral/lukewarm sentiment is sometimes misclassified as Negative
• Trained on a relatively small dataset (~20k examples); performance may vary on domain-specific text (e.g. product reviews vs. social media)

Author

Fine-tuned by Nusrat as part of an applied NLP/LLM portfolio project.