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:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.52.pdf