The proliferation of fake news in digital media has become a significant societal concern, impacting public opinion, trust, and decision-making. This project focuses on the development of machine learning models for the detection of fake news. Leveraging a dataset containing both genuine and deceptive news articles, the proposed models employ natural language processing techniques, feature extraction and classification algorithms. This paper provides a solution to Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages - DravidianLangTech 2024. There are two sub tasks: Task 1 - The goal of this task is to classify a given social media text into original or fake. We propose an approach for this with the help of a supervised machine learning model – SVM (Support Vector Machine). The SVM classifier achieved a macro F1 score of 0.78 in test data and a rank 11. The Task 2 is classifying fake news articles in Malayalam language into different categories namely False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False and Mostly True.We have used Naive Bayes which achieved macro F1-score 0.3517 in test data and a rank 6.

Sentiment Analysis of Dravidian Languages has begun to garner attention recently as there is more need to analyze emotional responses and subjective opinions present in social media text. As this data is code-mixed and there are not many solutions to code-mixed text out there, we present to you a stellar solution to DravidianLangTech 2024: Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu task. To understand the sentiment of social media text, we used pre-trained transformer models and feature extraction vectorizers to classify the data with results that placed us 11th in the rankings for the Tamil task and 8th for the Tulu task with a accuracy F1 score of 0.12 and 0.30 which shows the efficiency of our approach.

Hate speech refers to the offensive remarks against a community or individual based on inherent characteristics. Hate speech against a community based on their caste and native are unfortunately prevalent in the society. Especially with social media platforms being a very popular tool for communication and sharing ideas, people post hate speech against caste or migrants on social medias. The Shared Task LT–EDI 2024: Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection was created with the objective to create an automatic classification system that detects and classifies hate speech posted on social media targeting a community belonging to a particular caste and migrants. Datasets in Tamil language were provided along with the shared task. We experimented with several traditional models such as Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression, Random Forest Classifier and Decision Tree Classifier out of which Support Vector Machine yielded the best results placing us 8th in the rank list released by the organizers.

Meme is a very popular term prevailing among almost all social media platforms in recent days. A meme can be a combination of text and image whose sole purpose is meant to be funny and entertain people. Memes can sometimes promote misogynistic content expressing hatred, contempt, or prejudice against women. The Shared Task LT–EDI 2024: Multitask Meme Classification: Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes Task 1 was created with the purpose to classify social media memes as “misogynistic” and “Non - Misogynistic”. The task encompassed Tamil and Malayalam datasets. We separately classified the textual data using Multinomial Naive Bayes and pictorial data using ResNet50 model. The results of from both data were combined to yield an overall result. We were ranked 2nd for both languages in this task.

Homophobia and transphobia are terms which are used to describe the fear or hatred towards people who are attracted to the same sex or people whose psychological gender differs from his biological sex. People use social media to exert this behaviour. The increased amount of abusive content negatively affects people in a lot of ways. It makes the environment toxic and unpleasant to LGBTQ+ people. The paper talks about the classification model for classifying the contents into 3 categories which are homophobic, transphobic and nonhomophobic/ transphobic. We used many traditional models like Support Vector Machine, Random Classifier, Logistic Regression and KNearest Neighbour to achieve this. The macro average F1 scores for Malayalam, Telugu, English, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi are 0.88, 0.94, 0.96, 0.78, 0.93, 0.77, 0.94, 0.47 and the rank for these languages are 5, 6, 9, 6, 8, 6, 6, 4.

Social media is the media through which people share their thoughts and opinions. This has both its pros and cons which depends on the type of information being conveyed. If any information conveyed over social media hurts or affects a person, such information can be removed as it may disturb their mental health and may decrease their self confidence. During the last decade, hateful and sexist content towards women in being increasingly spread on social networks. The exposure to sexist speech has serious consequences to women’s life and limits their freedom of speech. Sexism is expressed in very different forms: it includes subtle stereotypes and attitudes that, although frequently unnoticed, are extremely harmful for both women and society. Sexist comments have a major impact on women being subjected to it. We as a team participated in the shared task Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS) at SemEval 2023 and have proposed a model which identifies the sexist comments and its type from English social media posts using the data set shared for the task. Different transformer model like BERT , DistilBERT and RoBERT are used by the proposed model for implementing all the three tasks shared by EDOS. On using the BERT model, macro F1 score of 0.8073, 0.5876 and 0.3729 are achieved for Task A, Task B and Task C respectively.