Sandesh Shrestha


2025

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MLInitiative at CASE 2025: Multimodal Detection of Hate Speech, Humor,and Stance using Transformers
Ashish Acharya | Ankit Bk | Bikram K.c. | Surabhi Adhikari | Rabin Thapa | Sandesh Shrestha | Tina Lama
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Texts

In recent years, memes have developed as popular forms of online satire and critique, artfully merging entertainment, social critique, and political discourse. On the other side, memes have also become a medium for the spread of hate speech, misinformation, and bigotry, especially towards marginalized communities, including the LGBTQ+ population. Solving this problem calls for the development of advanced multimodal systems that analyze the complex interplay between text and visuals in memes. This paper describes our work in the CASE@RANLP 2025 shared task. As a part of that task, we developed systems for hate speech detection, target identification, stance classification, and humor recognition within the text of memes. We investigate two multimodal transformer-based systems, ResNet-18 with BERT and SigLIP2, for these sub-tasks. Our results show that SigLIP-2 consistently outperforms the baseline, achieving an F1 score of 79.27 in hate speech detection, 72.88 in humor classification, and competitive performance in stance 60.59 and target detection 54.86. Through this study, we aim to contribute to the development of ethically grounded, inclusive NLP systems capable of interpreting complex sociolinguistic narratives in multi-modal content.

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Nepali Transformers@NLU of Devanagari Script Languages 2025: Detection of Language, Hate Speech and Targets
Pilot Khadka | Ankit Bk | Ashish Acharya | Bikram K.c. | Sandesh Shrestha | Rabin Thapa
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025)

The Devanagari script, an Indic script used by a diverse range of South Asian languages, presents a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. The dialect and language variation, complex script features, and limited language-specific tools make development difficult. This shared task aims to address this challenge by bringing together researchers and practitioners to solve three key problems: Language identification, Hate speech detection, and Targets of Hate speech identification. The selected languages- Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Bhojpuri- are widely used in South Asia and represent distinct linguistic structures. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of both machine-learning models and transformer-based models on all three sub-tasks. Our results demonstrate strong performance of the multilingual transformer model, particularly one pre-trained on domain-specific social media data, across all three tasks. The multilingual RoBERTa model, trained on the Twitter dataset, achieved a remarkable accuracy and F1-score of 99.5% on language identification (Task A), 88.3% and 72.5% on Hate Speech detection (Task B), and 68.6% and 61.8% on Hate Speech Target Classification (Task C).