Paramananda@NLU of Devanagari Script Languages 2025: Detection of Language, Hate Speech and Targets using FastText and BERT

Darwin Acharya, Sundeep Dawadi, Shivram Saud, Sunil Regmi


Abstract
This paper presents a comparative analysis of FastText and BERT-based approaches for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Devanagari script languages. We evaluate these models on three critical tasks: language identification, hate speech detection, and target identification across five languages: Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri, and Hindi. Our experiments, although with raw tweet dataset but extracting only devanagari script, demonstrate that while both models achieve exceptional performance in language identification (F1 scores > 0.99), they show varying effectiveness in hate speech detection and target identification tasks. FastText with augmented data outperforms BERT in hate speech detection (F1 score: 0.8552 vs 0.5763), while BERT shows superior performance in target identification (F1 score: 0.5785 vs 0.4898). These findings contribute to the growing body of research on NLU for low-resource languages and provide insights into model selection for specific tasks in Devanagari script processing.
Anthology ID:
2025.chipsal-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, Ashwini Vaidya, Bal Krishna Bal, Sana Shams, Surendrabikram Thapa
Venues:
CHiPSAL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
334–338
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.chipsal-1.39/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Darwin Acharya, Sundeep Dawadi, Shivram Saud, and Sunil Regmi. 2025. Paramananda@NLU of Devanagari Script Languages 2025: Detection of Language, Hate Speech and Targets using FastText and BERT. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025), pages 334–338, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Paramananda@NLU of Devanagari Script Languages 2025: Detection of Language, Hate Speech and Targets using FastText and BERT (Acharya et al., CHiPSAL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.chipsal-1.39.pdf