Anindya Majumder


2026

In Dravidian languages, political memes progressively shape public opinion and political discourse, influencing digital conversations andpublic narratives. Our paper proposes a multilevel multimodal framework for political meme classification in Tamil and Malayalam as part of the Multi Level Political Meme ClassificationDravidianLangTech@ACL 2026 shared task. The task has involved two levels: Level 1 has identified whether a meme expresses Troll/Oppose or Support/Praise, while Level 2 has determined the specific target category (Individual, Party, or Intersection). We have evaluated unimodal and multimodal architectures to analyze the impact of textual and visual representation. Experimental results have highlighted the importance of a multimodal approach over unimodal approaches. This workconfirms the effectiveness of combining image and text features in meme understanding. Among the evaluated models, the mBERT+ViTarchitecture has achieved the best overall performance across both languages and classification levels. According to the evaluation of shared task we achieved average F1 score of 0.72 securing the 2nd rank in Malayalam task and F1 score of 0.76 in Tamil task securing the 6th rank. However after our experimental evaluation we got best average F1 score of 0.62 for Tamil and 0.49 for Malayalam. Despite moderate results, challenges have remained mainly due to the dataset size, class imbalance, and noisy text extraction from images.