This study pioneers the development of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for the Malasar language, an extremely low-resource ethnic language spoken by a tribal community in the Western Ghats of South India. Malasar is primarily an oral language which does not have a native script. Therefore, Malasar is often transcribed in Tamil script, a closely related major language. This work presents the first ever effort of leveraging the capabilities of multilingual transfer learning for recognising malasar speech. We fine-tune a pre-trained multilingual transformer model with Malasar speech data. In our endeavour to fine-tune this model using a Malasar speech corpus, we could successfully bring down the WER to 48.00% from 99.08% (zero shot baseline). This work demonstrates the efficacy of multilingual transfer learning in addressing the challenges of ASR for extremely low-resource languages, contributing to the preservation of their linguistic and cultural heritage.

We participated in the Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu - DravidianLangTech 2023-RANLP 2023 task in the team name of VEL. This research focuses on addressing the challenge of detecting sentiment analysis in social media code-mixed comments written in Tamil and Tulu languages. Code-mixed text in social media often deviates from strict grammar rules and incorporates non-native scripts, making sentiment identification a complex task. To tackle this issue, we employ pre-processing techniques to remove unnecessary content and develop a model specifically designed for sentiment analysis detection. Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of traditional machine-learning models combined with feature extraction techniques. Our best model logistic regression configurations achieve impressive macro F1 scores of 0.43 on the Tamil test set and 0.51 on the Tulu test set, indicating promising results in accurately detecting instances of sentiment in code-mixed comments.

Detecting offensive language in social media in local languages is critical for moderating user-generated content. Thus, the field of offensive language identification in under-resourced Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada languages are essential. As the user-generated content is more code-mixed and not well studied for under-resourced languages, it is imperative to create resources and conduct benchmarking studies to encourage research in under-resourced Dravidian languages. We created a shared task on offensive language detection in Dravidian languages. We summarize here the dataset for this challenge which are openly available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27654, and present an overview of the methods and the results of the competing systems.

There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-Chinese are available. There are no resources available for Malayalam-English code-mixed data. This paper presents a new gold standard corpus for sentiment analysis of code-mixed text in Malayalam-English annotated by voluntary annotators. This gold standard corpus obtained a Krippendorff’s alpha above 0.8 for the dataset. We use this new corpus to provide the benchmark for sentiment analysis in Malayalam-English code-mixed texts.

To overpass the disparity between theory and applications in language-related technology in the text as well as speech and several other areas, a well-designed and well-developed corpus is essential. Several problems and issues encountered while developing a corpus, especially for low resource languages. The Malayalam Speech Corpus (MSC) is one of the first open speech corpora for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research to the best of our knowledge. It consists of 250 hours of Agricultural speech data. We are providing a transcription file, lexicon and annotated speech along with the audio segment. It is available in future for public use upon request at “www.iiitmk.ac.in/vrclc/utilities/ml_speechcorpus”. This paper details the development and collection process in the domain of agricultural speech corpora in the Malayalam Language.