In this paper, we discuss the nlpBDpatriots entry to the shared task on Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts organized at the first workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP) co-located with EMNLP. The main objective of this task is to identify the polarity of social media content using a Bangla dataset annotated with positive, neutral, and negative labels provided by the shared task organizers. Our best system for this task is a transfer learning approach with data augmentation which achieved a micro F1 score of 0.71. Our best system ranked 12th among 30 teams that participated in the competition.

This paper describes our approach to submissions made at Shared Task 2 at BLP Workshop - Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts. Sentiment Analysis is an action research area in the digital age. With the rapid and constant growth of online social media sites and services and the increasing amount of textual data, the application of automatic Sentiment Analysis is on the rise. However, most of the research in this domain is based on the English language. Despite being the world's sixth most widely spoken language, little work has been done in Bangla. This task aims to promote work on Bangla Sentiment Analysis while identifying the polarity of social media content by determining whether the sentiment expressed in the text is Positive, Negative, or Neutral. Our approach consists of experimenting and finetuning various multilingual and pre-trained BERT-based models on our downstream tasks and using a Majority Voting and Weighted ensemble model that outperforms individual baseline model scores. Our system scored 0.711 for the multiclass classification task and scored 10th place among the participants on the leaderboard for the shared task. Our code is available at https://github.com/ptnv-s/RSM-NLP-BLP-Task2 .