@inproceedings{kp-etal-2026-synapse,
    title = "{SYNAPSE}@{D}ravidian{L}ang{T}ech 2026: Multi-Level Political Meme Classification for {T}amil and {M}alayalam",
    author = "KP, Suriya  and
      K, Durai Singh  and
      G, Gnanasabesan  and
      S, Ganesh Sundhar  and
      N, Hari Krishnan  and
      G, Jyothish Lal",
    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-1.60/",
    pages = "381--386",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-401-9",
    abstract = "Political memes in Tamil and Malayalampresent unique multimodal challenges for automated under-standing, combining visual context with code-mixed, cultur-ally grounded text. We present SYNAPSE, our system forthe DravidianLangTech@ACL 2026 shared task on multi-levelpolitical meme classification. The task requires hierarchicalclassification of memes along two levels: Level 1 identifies thepolitical stance (Support/Praise vs. Troll/Oppose), and Level 2identifies the target (individual person vs. party). Our approachfine-tunes the Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct vision-language modelusing parameter-efficient LoRA adapters on task-specific mul-timodal data, with structured output prompting for hierarchi-cal label prediction. We report results for both Tamil andMalayalam subtracks. For Malayalam, our system achievesa Level 1 F1 of 0.9200 and Level 2 F1 of 0.4256 (Avg-F1:0.6728, Rank 5). For Tamil, our system achieves a Level 1 F1of 0.7840 and Level 2 F1 of 0.4885 (Avg-F1: 0.6362, Rank 14)."
}