Enhancing Zero-Shot Domain Transfer in Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study in Marathi

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a key task in Natural Language Processing that determines the polarity of opinions in text. For low-resource languages like Marathi--where limited data prevents the direct use of standard statistical methods--models are often trained on single-domain datasets. While this yields strong in-domain performance, it leads to poor generalization to unseen domains. Recent studies highlight the need for domain-robust systems that can handle diverse real-world content through multi-domain modeling. This study investigates how multi-domain training improves sentiment classification for unseen Marathi domains. Models are trained using single-domain, two-domain, and three-domain dataset combinations. Results show that two-domain training improves accuracy on unseen domains by about 8\% compared to single-domain training. Adding a third domain provides further improvement, though the gain is smaller, averaging around 2\% for some domains. These results suggest that training with data from multiple domains helps build more robust sentiment analysis models for low-resource languages, though the benefits reduce as more domains are added.