Hate and offensive language detection is the task of detecting hate and/or offensive content targetting a person or a group of people. Despite many efforts to detect hate and offensive content on social media platforms, the problem remains unsolved till date due to the ever growing social media users and their creativity to create and spread hate and offensive content. To address the automatic detection of hate and offensive content on social media platforms, this paper describes the learning models submitted by our team - MUCS to “Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu): DravidianLangTech@EACL” - a shared task organized at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024 invites the research community to address the challenges of detecting hate and offensive language in Telugu language. In this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the learning models submitted to the above mentioned shared task. Three models: Three models: i) LR model - a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm fed with TF-IDF of n-grams of subword, word and char_wb are in the range (1, 3), (1, 3), and (1, 5), ii) TL- a pretrained BERT models which makes use of Hate-speech-CNERG/bert-base-uncased-hatexplain model and iii) Ensemble model which is the combination of ML classifieres( MNB, LR, GNB) trained CountVectorizer with word and char ngrams of range (1, 3) and (1, 5) respectively. Proposed LR model trained with TF-IDF of subword, word and char n-grams outperformed the other models with macro F1 scores of 0.6501 securing 15th rankin the shared task for Telugu text.

Misogynistic memes are a category of memes which contain disrespectful language targeting women on social media platforms. Hence, detecting such memes is necessary in order to maintain a healthy social media environment. To address the challenges of detecting misogynistic memes, “Multitask Meme classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes: LT-EDI@EACL 2024” shared task organized at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024, invites researchers to develop models to detect misogynistic memes in Tamil and Malayalam. The shared task has two subtasks, and in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the learning models submitted to Task 1 - Identification of Misogynistic Memes in Tamil and Malayalam. As memes represent multi-modal data of image and text, three models: i) Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)+Residual Network (ResNet)-50, ii) Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL)+ResNet-50, and iii) multilingual BERT (mBERT)+ResNet50, are proposed based on joint representation of text and image, for detecting misogynistic memes in Tamil and Malayalam. Among the proposed models, mBERT+ResNet-50 and MuRIL+ ResNet-50 models obtained macro F1 scores of 0.73 and 0.87 for Tamil and Malayalam datasets respectively securing 1st rank for both the datasets in the shared task.