DravLingua@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Dravidian Languages using Late Fusion of Muril and Wav2Vec Models

Aishwarya Selvamurugan


Abstract
Detecting hate speech on social media is increasingly difficult, particularly in low-resource Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Traditional approaches primarily rely on text-based classification, often overlooking the multimodal nature of online communication, where speech plays a pivotal role in spreading hate speech. We propose a multimodal hate speech detection model using a late fusion technique that integrates Wav2Vec 2.0 for speech processing and Muril for text analysis. Our model is evaluated on the DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025 dataset, which contains speech and text data in Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam scripts. The dataset is categorized into six classes: Non-Hate, Gender Hate, Political Hate, Religious Hate, Religious Defamation, and Personal Defamation. To address class imbalance, we incorporate class weighting and data augmentation techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the late fusion approach effectively captures patterns of hate speech that may be missed when analyzing a single modality. This highlights the importance of multimodal strategies in enhancing hate speech detection, particularly for low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.dravidianlangtech-1.118
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Elizabeth Sherly, Saranya Rajiakodi, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Subalalitha Cn, Dhivya Chinnappa
Venues:
DravidianLangTech | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
694–699
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.118/
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Cite (ACL):
Aishwarya Selvamurugan. 2025. DravLingua@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Dravidian Languages using Late Fusion of Muril and Wav2Vec Models. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 694–699, Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DravLingua@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Dravidian Languages using Late Fusion of Muril and Wav2Vec Models (Selvamurugan, DravidianLangTech 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.118.pdf