Abusive language content such as hate speech, profanity, and cyberbullying etc., which is common in online platforms is creating lot of problems to the users as well as policy makers. Hence, detection of such abusive language in user-generated online content has become increasingly important over the past few years. Online platforms strive hard to moderate the abusive content to reduce societal harm, comply with laws, and create a more inclusive environment for their users. In spite of various methods to automatically detect abusive languages in online platforms, the problem still persists. To address the automatic detection of abusive languages in online platforms, this paper describes the models submitted by our team - MUCIC to the shared task on “Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil-ACL 2022”. This shared task addresses the abusive comment detection in native Tamil script texts and code-mixed Tamil texts. To address this challenge, two models: i) n-gram-Multilayer Perceptron (n-gram-MLP) model utilizing MLP classifier fed with char-n gram features and ii) 1D Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (1D Conv-LSTM) model, were submitted. The n-gram-MLP model fared well among these two models with weighted F1-scores of 0.560 and 0.430 for code-mixed Tamil and native Tamil script texts, respectively. This work may be reproduced using the code available in https://github.com/anushamdgowda/abusive-detection.

Spreading positive vibes or hope content on social media may help many people to get motivated in their life. To address Hope Speech detection in YouTube comments, this paper presents the description of the models submitted by our team - MUCIC, to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (HopeEDI) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. This shared task consists of texts in five languages, namely: English, Spanish (in Latin scripts), and Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada (in code-mixed native and Roman scripts) with the aim of classifying the YouTube comment into “Hope”, “Not-Hope” or “Not-Intended” categories. The proposed methodology uses the re-sampling technique to deal with imbalanced data in the corpus and obtained 1st rank for English language with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.550 and weighted-averaged F1-score of 0.860. The code to reproduce this work is available in GitHub.

Hope is an inherent part of human life and essential for improving the quality of life. Hope increases happiness and reduces stress and feelings of helplessness. Hope speech is the desired outcome for better and can be studied using text from various online sources where people express their desires and outcomes. In this paper, we address a deep-learning approach with a combination of linguistic and psycho-linguistic features for hope-speech detection. We report our best results submitted to LT-EDI-2022 which ranked 2nd and 3rd in English and Spanish respectively.

Substantial amount of text data which is increasingly being generated and shared on the internet and social media every second affect the society positively or negatively almost in any aspect of online world and also business and industries. Sentiments/opinions/reviews’ of users posted on social media are the valuable information that have motivated researchers to analyze them to get better insight and feedbacks about any product such as a video in Instagram, a movie in Netflix, or even new brand car introduced by BMW. Sentiments are usually written using a combination of languages such as English which is resource rich and regional languages such as Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, etc. which are resource poor. However, due to technical constraints, many users prefer to pen their opinions in Roman script. These kinds of texts written in two or more languages using a common language script or different language scripts are called code-mixing texts. Code-mixed texts are increasing day-by-day with the increase in the number of users depending on various online platforms. Analyzing such texts pose a real challenge for the researchers. In view of the challenges posed by the code-mixed texts, this paper describes three proposed models namely, SACo-Ensemble, SACo-Keras, and SACo-ULMFiT using Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Transfer Learning (TL) approaches respectively for the task of Sentiments Analysis in Tamil-English and Malayalam-English code-mixed texts.

This paper describes the models submitted by the team MUCS for Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages-EACL 2021 shared task that aims at identifying and classifying code-mixed texts of three language pairs namely, Kannada-English (Kn-En), Malayalam-English (Ma-En), and Tamil-English (Ta-En) into six predefined categories (5 categories in Ma-En language pair). Two models, namely, COOLI-Ensemble and COOLI-Keras are trained with the char sequences extracted from the sentences combined with words as features. Out of the two proposed models, COOLI-Ensemble model (best among our models) obtained first rank for Ma-En language pair with 0.97 weighted F1-score and fourth and sixth ranks with 0.75 and 0.69 weighted F1-score for Ta-En and Kn-En language pairs respectively.

This paper describes the models submitted by the team MUCS for “Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion-EACL 2021” shared task that aims at classifying a comment / post in English and code-mixed texts in two language pairs, namely, Tamil-English (Ta-En) and Malayalam-English (Ma-En) into one of the three predefined categories, namely, “Hope_speech”, “Non_hope_speech”, and “other_languages”. Three models namely, CoHope-ML, CoHope-NN, and CoHope-TL based on Ensemble of classifiers, Keras Neural Network (NN) and BiLSTM with Conv1d model respectively are proposed for the shared task. CoHope-ML, CoHope-NN models are trained on a feature set comprised of char sequences extracted from sentences combined with words for Ma-En and Ta-En code-mixed texts and a combination of word and char ngrams along with syntactic word ngrams for English text. CoHope-TL model consists of three major parts: training tokenizer, BERT Language Model (LM) training and then using pre-trained BERT LM as weights in BiLSTM-Conv1d model. Out of three proposed models, CoHope-ML model (best among our models) obtained 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ranks with weighted F1-scores of 0.85, 0.92, and 0.59 for Ma-En, English and Ta-En texts respectively.

Social media analytics are widely being explored by researchers for various applications. Prominent among them are identifying and blocking abusive contents especially targeting individuals and communities, for various reasons. The increasing abusive contents and the increasing number of users on social media demands automated tools to detect and filter the abusive contents as it is highly impossible to handle this manually. To address the challenges of detecting abusive contents, this paper describes the approaches proposed by our team MUCIC for Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification shared task (ComMA@ICON) at International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 2021. This shared task dataset consists of code-mixed multi-script texts in Meitei, Bangla, Hindi as well as in Multilingual (a combination of Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, and English). The shared task is modeled as a multi-label Text Classification (TC) task combining word and char n-grams with vectors obtained from Multilingual Sentence Encoder (MSE) to train the Machine Learning (ML) classifiers using Pre-aggregation and Post-aggregation of labels. These approaches obtained the highest performance in the shared task for Meitei, Bangla, and Multilingual texts with instance-F1 scores of 0.350, 0.412, and 0.380 respectively using Pre-aggregation of labels.

The increase in domain specific text processing applications are demanding tools and techniques for domain specific Text Classification (TC) which may be helpful in many downstream applications like Machine Translation, Summarization, Question Answering etc. Further, many TC algorithms are applied on globally recognized languages like English giving less importance for local languages particularly Indian languages. To boost the research for technical domains and text processing activities in Indian languages, a shared task named ”TechDOfication2020” is organized by ICON’20. The objective of this shared task is to automatically identify the technical domain of a given text which provides information about coarse grained technical domains and fine grained subdomains in eight languages. To tackle this challenge we, team MUCS have proposed three models, namely, DL-FineTuned model applied for all subtasks, and VC-FineTuned and VC-ngrams models applied only for some subtasks. n-grams and word embedding with a step of fine-tuning are used as features and machine learning and deep learning algorithms are used as classifiers in the proposed models. The proposed models outperformed in most of subtasks and also obtained first rank in subTask1b (Bangla) and subTask1e (Malayalam) with f1 score of 0.8353 and 0.3851 respectively using DL-FineTuned model for both the subtasks.