Ensuring a safe and inclusive online environment requires effective hate speech detection on social media. While detection systems have significantly advanced for English, many regional languages, including Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, remain underrepresented, creating challenges in identifying harmful content accurately. These languages present unique challenges due to their complex grammar, diverse dialects, and frequent code-mixing with English. The rise of multimodal content, including text and audio, adds further complexity to detection tasks. The shared task “Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Dravidian Languages: DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025” has aimed to address these challenges. A Youtube-sourced dataset has been provided, labeled into five categories: Gender (G), Political (P), Religious (R), Personal Defamation (C) and Non-Hate (NH). In our approach, we have used mBERT, T5 for text and Wav2Vec2 and Whisper for audio. T5 has performed poorly compared to mBERT, which has achieved the highest F1 scores on the test dataset. For audio, Wav2Vec2 has been chosen over Whisper because it processes raw audio effectively using self-supervised learning. In the hate speech detection task, we have achieved a macro F1 score of 0.2005 for Malayalam, ranking 15th in this task, 0.1356 for Tamil and 0.1465 for Telugu, with both ranking 16th in this task.

Memes, originally crafted for humor or cultural commentary, have evolved into powerful tools for spreading harmful content, particularly misogynistic ideologies. These memes sustain damaging gender stereotypes, further entrenching social inequality and encouraging toxic behavior across online platforms. While progress has been made in detecting harmful memes in English, identifying misogynistic content in Chinese remains challenging due to the language’s complexities and cultural subtleties. The multimodal nature of memes, combining text and images, adds to the detection difficulty. In the LT-EDI@LDK 2025 Shared Task on Misogyny Meme Detection, we have focused on analyzing both text and image elements to identify misogynistic content in Chinese memes. For text-based models, we have experimented with Chinese BERT, XLM-RoBERTa and DistilBERT, with Chinese BERT yielding the highest performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.86. In terms of image models, VGG16 outperformed ResNet and ViT, also achieving an F1 score of 0.85. Among all model combinations, the integration of Chinese BERT with VGG16 emerged as the most impactful, delivering superior performance, highlighting the benefit of a multimodal approach. By exploiting these two modalities, our model has effectively captured the subtle details present in memes, improving its ability to accurately detect misogynistic content. This approach has resulted in a macro F1 score of 0.90355, securing 3rd rank in the task.