Aishwarya Selvamurugan


2025

Detecting hate speech on social media is increasingly difficult, particularly in low-resource Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Traditional approaches primarily rely on text-based classification, often overlooking the multimodal nature of online communication, where speech plays a pivotal role in spreading hate speech. We propose a multimodal hate speech detection model using a late fusion technique that integrates Wav2Vec 2.0 for speech processing and Muril for text analysis. Our model is evaluated on the DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025 dataset, which contains speech and text data in Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam scripts. The dataset is categorized into six classes: Non-Hate, Gender Hate, Political Hate, Religious Hate, Religious Defamation, and Personal Defamation. To address class imbalance, we incorporate class weighting and data augmentation techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the late fusion approach effectively captures patterns of hate speech that may be missed when analyzing a single modality. This highlights the importance of multimodal strategies in enhancing hate speech detection, particularly for low-resource languages.