@inproceedings{thirumoorthy-etal-2025-hydrangea,
    title = "Hydrangea@{D}ravidian{L}an{T}ech2025: Abusive language Identification from {T}amil and {M}alayalam Text using Transformer Models",
    author = "Thirumoorthy, Shanmitha  and
      Durairaj, Thenmozhi  and
      Rajalakshmi, Ratnavel",
    editor = "Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      Priyadharshini, Ruba  and
      Madasamy, Anand Kumar  and
      Thavareesan, Sajeetha  and
      Sherly, Elizabeth  and
      Rajiakodi, Saranya  and
      Palani, Balasubramanian  and
      Subramanian, Malliga  and
      Cn, Subalalitha  and
      Chinnappa, Dhivya",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.100/",
    pages = "580--584",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-228-2",
    abstract = "Abusive language toward women on the Internet has always been perceived as a danger to free speech and safe online spaces. In this paper, we discuss three transformer-based models - BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and DistilBERT-in identifying gender-abusive comments in Tamil and Malayalam YouTube contents. We fine-tune and compare these models using a dataset provided by DravidianLangTech 2025 shared task for identifying the abusive content from social media. Compared to the models above, the results of XLM-RoBERTa are better and reached F1 scores of 0.7708 for Tamil and 0.6876 for Malayalam. BERT followed with scores of 0.7658 (Tamil) and 0.6671 (Malayalam). Of the DistilBERTs, performance was varyingly different for the different languages. A large difference in performance between the models, especially in the case of Malayalam, indicates that working in low-resource languages is difficult. The choice of a model is extremely critical in applying abusive language detection. The findings would be important information for effective content moderation systems in linguistically diverse contexts. In general, it would promote safe online spaces for women in South Indian language communities."
}