cantnlp@DravidianLangTech-2025: A Bag-of-Sounds Approach to Multimodal Hate Speech Detection

Sidney Wong, Andrew Li


Abstract
This paper presents the systems and results for the Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages (MSMDA-DL) shared task at the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages (DravidianLangTech-2025). We took a ‘bag-of-sounds’ approach by training our hate speech detection system on the speech (audio) data using transformed Mel spectrogram measures. While our candidate model performed poorly on the test set, our approach offered promising results during training and development for Malayalam and Tamil. With sufficient and well-balanced training data, our results show that it is feasible to use both text and speech (audio) data in the development of multimodal hate speech detection systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.dravidianlangtech-1.94
Volume:
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
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Elizabeth Sherly, Saranya Rajiakodi, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Subalalitha Cn, Dhivya Chinnappa
Venues:
DravidianLangTech | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
543–551
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.94/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sidney Wong and Andrew Li. 2025. cantnlp@DravidianLangTech-2025: A Bag-of-Sounds Approach to Multimodal Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 543–551, Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
cantnlp@DravidianLangTech-2025: A Bag-of-Sounds Approach to Multimodal Hate Speech Detection (Wong & Li, DravidianLangTech 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.94.pdf