byteSizedLLM@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Malayalam Using Attention-Driven BiLSTM, Malayalam-Topic-BERT, and Fine-Tuned Wav2Vec 2.0

Durga Prasad Manukonda, Rohith Gowtham Kodali, Daniel Iglesias


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2025.dravidianlangtech-1.12
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:
68–73
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.12/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Durga Prasad Manukonda, Rohith Gowtham Kodali, and Daniel Iglesias. 2025. byteSizedLLM@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Malayalam Using Attention-Driven BiLSTM, Malayalam-Topic-BERT, and Fine-Tuned Wav2Vec 2.0. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 68–73, Acoma, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
byteSizedLLM@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Malayalam Using Attention-Driven BiLSTM, Malayalam-Topic-BERT, and Fine-Tuned Wav2Vec 2.0 (Manukonda et al., DravidianLangTech 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2025.dravidianlangtech-1.12.pdf