Multimedia content, such as advertisements and story videos, exhibit a rich blend of creativity and multiple modalities. They incorporate elements like text, visuals, audio, and storytelling techniques, employing devices like emotions, symbolism, and slogans to convey meaning. There is a dearth of large annotated training datasets in the multimedia domain hindering the development of supervised learning models with satisfactory performance for real-world applications. On the other hand, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has witnessed remarkable zero-shot performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as emotion classification, question answering, and topic classification. To leverage such advanced techniques to bridge this performance gap in multimedia understanding, we propose verbalizing long videos to generate their descriptions in natural language, followed by performing video-understanding tasks on the generated story as opposed to the original video. Through extensive experiments on fifteen video-understanding tasks, we demonstrate that our method, despite being zero-shot, achieves significantly better results than supervised baselines for video understanding. Furthermore, to alleviate a lack of story understanding benchmarks, we publicly release the first dataset on a crucial task in computational social science on persuasion strategy identification.

In social media, there are instances where people present their opinions in strong language, resorting to abusive/toxic comments. There are instances of communal hatred, hate-speech, toxicity and bullying. And, in this age of social media, it’s very important to find means to keep check on these toxic comments, as to preserve the mental peace of people in social media. While there are tools, models to detect andpotentially filter these kind of content, developing these kinds of models for the low resource language space is an issue of research. In this paper, the task of abusive comment identification in Tamil language, is seen upon as a multi-class classification problem. There are different pre-processing as well as modelling approaches discussed in this paper. The different approaches are compared on the basis of weighted average accuracy.