PrimeLine@DravidianLangTech 2026: Hope Speech Detection in Tulu Using XLM-RoBERTa for Coarse and Fine-Grained Classification
Rithikaa V, S.Sumathi, Sanjay Krishnan K, Nithya Varshini C N R
Abstract
Hope speech detection in low-resource, code-mixed languages presents a genuine challenge for natural language processing. Tulu, a Dravidian language spoken along the coastal regions of Karnataka and Kerala, is one such language where social media content is deeply code-mixed, blending Tulu, Kannada script, and English within a single comment. Two classification tasks are addressed: a four-class coarse-grained setting (Track 1) and a five-class fine-grained setting (Track 2). XLM-RoBERTa, a cross-lingual transformer pre-trained on more than 100 languages, is fine-tuned on the task-provided datasets using Google Colab with an NVIDIA T4 GPU. The system achieves a Macro F1-score of 0.34 on Track 1 and 0.19 on Track 2 on the official Codabench evaluation, establishing the first transformer-based baseline for hope speech classification in Tulu.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.dravidianlangtech-1.52
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Underline (Virtual)
- Editors:
- Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Saranya Rajiakodi, Subalalitha Navaneethakrishnan, Dhivya Chinnappa, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel, Ratnavel Rajalakshmi
- Venues:
- DravidianLangTech | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 336–340
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.52/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Rithikaa V, S.Sumathi, Sanjay Krishnan K, and Nithya Varshini C N R. 2026. PrimeLine@DravidianLangTech 2026: Hope Speech Detection in Tulu Using XLM-RoBERTa for Coarse and Fine-Grained Classification. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 336–340, Underline (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- PrimeLine@DravidianLangTech 2026: Hope Speech Detection in Tulu Using XLM-RoBERTa for Coarse and Fine-Grained Classification (V et al., DravidianLangTech 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.52.pdf