This paper presents a novel approach to hate speech detection and target identification across Devanagari-script languages, with a focus on Hindi and Nepali. Leveraging an Attention BiLSTM-XLM-RoBERTa architecture, our model effectively captures language-specific features and sequential dependencies crucial for multilingual natural language understanding (NLU). In Task B (Hate Speech Detection), our model achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.7481, demonstrating its robustness in identifying hateful content across linguistic variations. For Task C (Target Identification), it reached a Macro F1 score of 0.6715, highlighting its ability to classify targets into “individual,” “organization,” and “community” with high accuracy. Our work addresses the gap in Devanagari-scripted multilingual hate speech analysis and sets a benchmark for future research in low-resource language contexts.

This research presents a robust multimodal framework for hate speech detection in Malayalam, combining fine-tuned Wav2Vec 2.0, Malayalam-Doc-Topic-BERT, and an Attention-Driven BiLSTM architecture. The proposed approach effectively integrates acoustic and textual features, achieving a macro F1-score of 0.84 on the Malayalam test set. Fine-tuning Wav2Vec 2.0 on Malayalam speech data and leveraging Malayalam-Doc-Topic-BERT significantly improved performance over prior methods using openly available models. The results highlight the potential of language-specific models and advanced multimodal fusion techniques for addressing nuanced hate speech categories, setting the stage for future work on Dravidian languages like Tamil and Telugu.