Sathiyaraj Thangasamy


2026

We investigate the role of large language models (LLMs) in promoting gender-inclusive language by evaluating their ability to rewrite biased text and generate counterfactual narratives across multiple languages. We introduce a shared task with two subtasks: gender-inclusive rewriting and counterfactual generation. The task covers five languages English, German, Spanish, Tamil, and Kannada reflecting diverse grammatical gender systems and sociocultural contexts. We release curated word-level and sentence-level datasets to support controlled inclusive generation. A total of 50 teams registered for the shared task, and around 8 teams submitted results. Submissions are evaluated using a hybrid framework combining rubric-based automatic scoring with expert human judgment. Finally, we provide an overview of participating systems and discuss key findings and challenges observed across languages.
Political sentiment analysis aims to automatically identify opinions and attitudes expressed in political discourse on social media platforms. This paper presents an overview of the TamilPoliSent 2026 shared task on multiclass political sentiment analysis in Tamil, organized as part of DravidianLangTech@ACL 2026. The task focuses on categorizing Tamil comments from X (formerly Twitter) into seven sentiment classes: Substantiated, Sarcastic, Opinionated, Positive, Negative, Neutral, and None of the above. The dataset consists of 5,440 annotated Tamil tweets collected from political discussions on social media. Participants were provided with labeled training and development datasets, while the test set was used for final evaluation.A total of 22 teams participated in the shared task and explored a wide range of modeling approaches including classical machine learning methods, transformer-based architectures, hybrid lexical–contextual models, and ensemble frameworks. System performance was evaluated using Macro F1-score to ensure balanced evaluation across all sentiment categories. The best-performing system achieved a Macro F1-score of 0.3935.The results highlight several challenges in Tamil political sentiment analysis, including class imbalance, sarcasm, informal writing styles, and semantic overlap between sentiment categories. The shared task demonstrates that transformer-based models combined with class-balanced learning and hybrid representations are effective for handling fine-grained political sentiment classification in low-resource languages. These findings contribute to advancing research in political discourse analysis and natural language processing for Tamil and other under-resourced languages.

2025

Hate speech targeting caste and migration communities is a growing concern in online platforms, particularly in linguistically diverse regions. By focusing on Tamil language text content, this task provides a unique opportunity to tackle caste or migration related hate speech detection in a low resource language Tamil, contributing to a safer digital space. We present the results and main findings of the shared task caste and migration hate speech detection. The task is a binary classification determining whether a text is caste/migration related hate speech or not. The task attracted 17 participating teams, experimenting with a wide range of methodologies from traditional machine learning to advanced multilingual transformers. The top performing system achieved a macro F1-score of 0.88105, enhancing an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer models including XLM-R and MuRIL. Our analysis highlights the effectiveness of multilingual transformers in low resource, ensemble learning, and culturally informed socio political context based techniques.
Political multiclass detection is the task of identifying the predefined seven political classes. In this paper, we report an overview of the findings on the “Political Multiclass Sentiment Analysis of Tamil X(Twitter) Comments” shared task conducted at the workshop on DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025. The participants were provided with annotated Twitter comments, which are split into training, development, and unlabelled test datasets. A total of 139 participants registered for this shared task, and 25 teams finally submitted their results. The performance of the submitted systems was evaluated and ranked in terms of the macro-F1 score.

2024

We present an overview of the first shared task on “Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection.” The shared task is organized as part of LTEDI@EACL 2024. The system must delineate between binary outcomes, ascertaining whether the text is categorized as a caste/migration hate speech or not. The dataset presented in this shared task is in Tamil, which is one of the under-resource languages. There are a total of 51 teams participated in this task. Among them, 15 teams submitted their research results for the task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the shared task has been conducted on textual hate speech detection concerning caste and migration. In this study, we have conducted a systematic analysis and detailed presentation of all the contributions of the participants as well as the statistics of the dataset, which is the social media comments in Tamil language to detect hate speech. It also further goes into the details of a comprehensive analysis of the participants’ methodology and their findings.
Code-mixed languages are increasingly prevalent on social media and online platforms, presenting significant challenges in offensive content detection for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Our study explores how effectively the Sentence Transfer Fine-tuning (Set-Fit) method, combined with logistic regression, detects offensive content in a Tamil-English code-mixed dataset. We compare our model’s performance with five other NLP models: Multilingual BERT (mBERT), LSTM, BERT, IndicBERT, and Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embeddings (LaBSE). Our model, SetFit, outperforms these models in accuracy, achieving an impressive 89.72%, significantly higher than other models. These results suggest the sentence transformer model’s substantial potential for detecting offensive content in codemixed languages. Our study provides valuable insights into the sentence transformer model’s ability to identify various types of offensive material in Tamil-English online conversations, paving the way for more advanced NLP systems tailored to code-mixed languages.

2022

This paper presents the overview of the shared task on emotional analysis in Tamil. The result of the shared task is presented at the workshop. This paper presents the dataset used in the shared task, task description, and the methodology used by the participants and the evaluation results of the submission. This task is organized as two Tasks. Task A is carried with 11 emotions annotated data for social media comments in Tamil and Task B is organized with 31 fine-grained emotion annotated data for social media comments in Tamil. For conducting experiments, training and development datasets were provided to the participants and results are evaluated for the unseen data. Totally we have received around 24 submissions from 13 teams. For evaluating the models, Precision, Recall, micro average metrics are used.