The rapid growth of digital platforms and social media has significantly contributed to spreading fake news, posing serious societal challenges. While extensive research has been conducted on detecting fake news in high-resource languages (HRLs) such as English, relatively little attention has been given to low-resource languages (LRLs) like Malayalam due to insufficient data and computational tools. To address this challenge, the DravidianLangTech 2025 workshop organized a shared task on fake news detection in Dravidian languages. The task was divided into two sub-tasks, and our team participated in Task 1, which focused on classifying social media texts as original or fake. We explored a range of machine learning (ML) techniques, including Logistic Regression (LR), Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM), as well as deep learning (DL) models such as CNN, BiLSTM, and a hybrid CNN+BiLSTM. Additionally, this work examined several transformer-based models, including m-BERT, Indic-BERT, XLM-Roberta, and MuRIL-BERT, to exploit the task. Our team achieved 6th place in Task 1, with MuRIL-BERT delivering the best performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.874.

With the exponential growth of social media usage, the prevalence of abusive language targeting women has become a pressing issue, particularly in low-resource languages (LRLs) like Tamil and Malayalam. This study is part of the shared task at DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025, which focuses on detecting abusive comments in Tamil social media content. The provided dataset consists of binary-labeled comments (Abusive or Non-Abusive), gathered from YouTube, reflecting explicit abuse, implicit bias, stereotypes, and coded language. We developed and evaluated multiple models for this task, including traditional machine learning algorithms (Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest Classifier, and Multinomial Naive Bayes), deep learning models (CNN, BiLSTM, and CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based architectures (DistilBERT, Multilingual BERT, XLM-RoBERTa), and fine-tuned variants of these models. Our best-performing model, Multilingual BERT, achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.7203, ranking 19 in the competition.

With the widespread usage of social media and effortless internet access, millions of posts and comments are generated every minute. Unfortunately, with this substantial rise, the usage of abusive language has increased significantly in these mediums. This proliferation leads to many hazards such as cyber-bullying, vulgarity, online harassment and abuse. Therefore, it becomes a crucial issue to detect and mitigate the usage of abusive language. This work presents our system developed as part of the shared task to detect the abusive language in Tamil. We employed three machine learning (LR, DT, SVM), two deep learning (CNN+BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM with FastText) and a transformer-based model (Indic-BERT). The experimental results show that Logistic regression (LR) and CNN+BiLSTM models outperformed the others. Both Logistic Regression (LR) and CNN+BiLSTM with FastText achieved the weighted F₁-score of 0.39. However, LR obtained a higher recall value (0.44) than CNN+BiLSTM (0.36). This leads us to stand the 2^nd rank in the shared task competition.