  We present an overview of the BLP Sentiment Shared Task, organized as part of
the inaugural BLP 2023 workshop, co-located with EMNLP 2023. The task is
defined as the detection of sentiment in a given piece of social media text.
This task attracted interest from 71 participants, among whom 29 and 30 teams
submitted systems during the development and evaluation phases, respectively.
In total, participants submitted 597 runs. However, a total of 15 teams
submitted system description papers. The range of approaches in the submitted
systems spans from classical machine learning models, fine-tuning pre-trained
models, to leveraging Large Language Model (LLMs) in zero- and few-shot
settings. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of the task setup,
including dataset development and evaluation setup. Additionally, we provide a
brief overview of the systems submitted by the participants. All datasets and
evaluation scripts from the shared task have been made publicly available for
the research community, to foster further research in this domain.
