README.md

metadata

license: mit
task_categories:
  - text-classification
language:
  - mg
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K

Dataset Card for Vaovao Malagasy Sentiment Corpus (VMSC)

Dataset Summary

The Vaovao Malagasy Sentiment Corpus (VMSC) is the first publicly available, manually annotated sentiment analysis dataset for the Malagasy language (mg). It contains 5,041 sentences extracted from news articles (vaovao) published between 2022 and 2023.

Each sentence is labeled with binary sentiment (Positive or Negative). The dataset was created to address the scarcity of resources for Malagasy NLP and benchmarks. It features high-quality annotations performed by native speakers, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of Cohen’s Kappa = 0.96.

This dataset is the official corpus presented in the paper published in Language Resources and Evaluation (Springer, 2025).

Supported Tasks

• Sentiment Analysis: Binary classification (Positive vs. Negative).
• Transfer Learning: Benchmarking pre-trained models (e.g., XLM-R, mBERT) on Malagasy.
• Low-Resource NLP: Serving as a gold-standard evaluation set for low-resource language studies.

Languages

• Language: Malagasy (mg)
• Variant: Standard Malagasy (official dialect used in media and government).

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

An example of a data point looks like this:

{
  "text": "Tena nety ny vokatra azo tamin'ny tetikasa.",
  "label": 1
}

Data Fields

• text: The news sentence (string).
• label: The sentiment label (integer).
  • 0: Negative
  • 1: Positive

Data Splits

The dataset contains a total of 5,041 sentences.

Dataset Creation

• Source: Malagasy news articles published between 2022 and 2023.
• Annotation: Manually annotated by native speakers.
• Quality Control: Rigorous annotation protocol resulting in a Cohen’s Kappa score of 0.96.

How to Use

You can load this dataset directly using the Hugging Face datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the dataset
dataset = load_dataset("Lo-Renz-O/vaovao_malagasy_sentiment_corpus")

# View the first training example
print(dataset['train'][0])

Citation

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite both the paper (methodology) and the dataset version:

1. Paper citation:

@article{Mamelona2025VMSC,
  author = {Lorenzo Mamelona, Sitraka Ny Aina Raharivelo, Andriamanarivo Tatiana Miarintsoa, Bright Bediako-Kyeremeh & Benjamin Kwapong Osibo}, 
  title = {Towards robust Malagasy NLP: a novel corpus and evaluation framework for sentiment analysis},
  journal = {Language Resources and Evaluation},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/s10579-025-09900-w},
  url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10579-025-09900-w}
}

2. Dataset Citation (DOI):

@misc{lorenzo_mamelona_2025,
  author       = {Lorenzo Mamelona, Sitraka Ny Aina Raharivelo, Andriamanarivo Tatiana Miarintsoa, Bright Bediako-Kyeremeh & Benjamin Kwapong Osibo},
  title        = {vaovao_malagasy_sentiment_corpus},
  year         = {2025},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Lo-Renz-O/vaovao_malagasy_sentiment_corpus},
  doi          = {10.57967/hf/6293},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face}
}