Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Standard Insights Extraction Pipeline for Bantu Languages

Extracting insights from data obtained from the web in order to identify people’s views and opinions on various topics is a growing practice. The standard insights extraction pipeline is typically an unsupervised machine learning task composed of processes that preprocess the text, visualize it, cluster and identify the topics and sentiment in each cluster, and then graph the network. Given the increasing amount of data being generated on the internet in Africa today, and the multilingual state of African countries, we evaluated how well the standard pipeline works when applied to text wholly or partially written in indigenous African languages, specifically Bantu languages. We carried out an exploratory investigation using Twitter data and compared the outputs from each step of the pipeline for an English dataset and a mixed Bantu language dataset. We found that for Bantu languages, due to their complex grammatical structure, extra preprocessing steps such as part-of-speech tagging and morphological analysis are required during data cleaning, threshold values should be adjusted during topic modeling, and semantic analysis should be performed before completing text preprocessing.