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.

This paper describes the IIITK’s team submissions to the hope speech detection for equality, diversity and inclusion in Dravidian languages shared task organized by LT-EDI 2021 workshop@EACL 2021. Our best configurations for the shared tasks achieve weighted F1 scores of 0.60 for Tamil, 0.83 for Malayalam, and 0.93 for English. We have secured ranks of 4, 3, 2 in Tamil, Malayalam and English respectively.