@inproceedings{r-etal-2026-hnk,
    title = "{HNK}@{D}ravidian{L}ang{T}ech 2026: Investigating Grapheme-Level Normalization for Abusive {T}amil Text Classification",
    author = "R, Hanish Vigneshwar  and
      Alaguraj, Nahul  and
      Manimaran, Karthikeyan  and
      Rajalakshmi, Ratnavel",
    editor = "Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      Priyadharshini, Ruba  and
      Madasamy, Anand Kumar  and
      Thavareesan, Sajeetha  and
      Rajiakodi, Saranya  and
      Navaneethakrishnan, Subalalitha  and
      Chinnappa, Dhivya  and
      Palani, Balasubramanian  and
      Subramanian, Malliga  and
      Shanmugavadivel, Kogilavani  and
      Rajalakshmi, Ratnavel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for {D}ravidian Languages",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Underline (Virtual)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.38/",
    pages = "258--262",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-401-9",
    abstract = "The increasing prevalence of social media has also correlated with an increase in abusive content targeting women, particularly for regional languages such as Tamil. The automatic identification of abusive content is critical for the creation of safer online spaces. In this paper, we focus on the abusive text detection of women in the context of binary text classification. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system on the abusive text detection of women using the IndicBERT, MuRIL, and Tamil-BERT models. Additionally, we propose the use of grapheme-aware normalization for the proposed system. Grapheme-aware normalization aims to maintain the structural integrity of Tamil characters at the Unicode level. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system using the Tamil-BERT model with grapheme-aware normalization achieves the best performance among the evaluated models. The proposed system achieved the third position in the shared task."
}