Abusive language content such as hate speech, profanity, and cyberbullying etc., which is common in online platforms is creating lot of problems to the users as well as policy makers. Hence, detection of such abusive language in user-generated online content has become increasingly important over the past few years. Online platforms strive hard to moderate the abusive content to reduce societal harm, comply with laws, and create a more inclusive environment for their users. In spite of various methods to automatically detect abusive languages in online platforms, the problem still persists. To address the automatic detection of abusive languages in online platforms, this paper describes the models submitted by our team - MUCIC to the shared task on “Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil-ACL 2022”. This shared task addresses the abusive comment detection in native Tamil script texts and code-mixed Tamil texts. To address this challenge, two models: i) n-gram-Multilayer Perceptron (n-gram-MLP) model utilizing MLP classifier fed with char-n gram features and ii) 1D Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (1D Conv-LSTM) model, were submitted. The n-gram-MLP model fared well among these two models with weighted F1-scores of 0.560 and 0.430 for code-mixed Tamil and native Tamil script texts, respectively. This work may be reproduced using the code available in https://github.com/anushamdgowda/abusive-detection.

Emotion Analysis (EA) is the process of automatically analyzing and categorizing the input text into one of the predefined sets of emotions. In recent years, people have turned to social media to express their emotions, opinions or feelings about news, movies, products, services, and so on. These users’ emotions may help the public, governments, business organizations, film producers, and others in devising strategies, making decisions, and so on. The increasing number of social media users and the increasing amount of user generated text containing emotions on social media demands automated tools for the analysis of such data as handling this data manually is labor intensive and error prone. Further, the characteristics of social media data makes the EA challenging. Most of the EA research works have focused on English language leaving several Indian languages including Tamil unexplored for this task. To address the challenges of EA in Tamil texts, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the model submitted to the shared task on Emotion Analysis in Tamil at DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022. Out of the two subtasks in this shared task, our team submitted the model only for Task a. The proposed model comprises of an Ensemble of Logistic Regression (LR) classifiers with three penalties, namely: L1, L2, and Elasticnet. This Ensemble model trained with Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) of character bigrams and trigrams secured 4th rank in Task a with a macro averaged F1-score of 0.04. The code to reproduce the proposed models is available in github1.

This paper presents an outline of the shared task on translation of under-resourced Dravidian languages at DravidianLangTech-2022 workshop to be held jointly with ACL 2022. A description of the datasets used, approach taken for analysis of submissions and the results have been illustrated in this paper. Five sub-tasks organized as a part of the shared task include the following translation pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Sanskrit, Kannada to Malayalam and Kannada to Tulu. Training, development and test datasets were provided to all participants and results were evaluated on the gold standard datasets. A total of 16 research groups participated in the shared task and a total of 12 submission runs were made for evaluation. Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score was used for evaluation of the translations.

Spreading positive vibes or hope content on social media may help many people to get motivated in their life. To address Hope Speech detection in YouTube comments, this paper presents the description of the models submitted by our team - MUCIC, to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (HopeEDI) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. This shared task consists of texts in five languages, namely: English, Spanish (in Latin scripts), and Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada (in code-mixed native and Roman scripts) with the aim of classifying the YouTube comment into “Hope”, “Not-Hope” or “Not-Intended” categories. The proposed methodology uses the re-sampling technique to deal with imbalanced data in the corpus and obtained 1st rank for English language with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.550 and weighted-averaged F1-score of 0.860. The code to reproduce this work is available in GitHub.

Social media has seen enormous growth in its users recently and knowingly or unknowingly the behavior of a person will be reflected in the comments she/he posts on social media. Users having the sign of depression may post negative or disturbing content seeking the attention of other users. Hence, social media data can be analysed to check whether the users’ have the sign of depression and help them to get through the situation if required. However, as analyzing the increasing amount of social media data manually in laborious and error-prone, automated tools have to be developed for the same. To address the issue of detecting the sign of depression content on social media, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe an Ensemble of Machine Learning (ML) models and a Transfer Learning (TL) model submitted to “Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022” (DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. Both frequency and text based features are used to train an Ensemble model and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) fine-tuned with raw text is used to train the TL model. Among the two models, the TL model performed better with a macro averaged F-score of 0.479 and placed 18th rank in the shared task. The code to reproduce the proposed models is available in github page1.