This paper presents an overview of the Shared Task on detecting homophobia and transphobia in meme datasets across three languages: Hindi, English, and Chinese. With the rapid growth of internet users worldwide, memes have become a widely used medium for expressing humor, satire, and sarcasm on social media platforms. However, their increasing popularity has also facilitated the spread of hate, misinformation, and propaganda targeting specific communities. Hateful memes often attack individuals or groups based on attributes such as physical appearance, language, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Among those affected, the LGBTQ+ community is particularly vulnerable and frequently targeted on social media platforms. To address this issue, we organized a shared task that focuses on identifying homophobic and transphobic hate in memes. The task aims to encourage the development of automated systems capable of detecting such harmful content across multiple languages. Evaluation was conducted using Macro F1-score as the primary metric. The top performing system achieved a Macro F1-score of 0.8377 for English, 0.8081 for Hindi, and 0.7535 for Chinese, demonstrating promising results for multilingual hate detection in memes.

Online platforms continue to witness harmful expressions targeting LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly in the form of homophobic and transphobic comments. While detection of such content has received substantial attention, generating constructive counter-narratives remains comparatively underexplored. In this shared task, we focus on counter-narrative generation in English and Tamil. Participants were provided with social media comments labeled as homophobic or transphobic and were required to generate respectful, contextually appropriate responses that challenge prejudice and promote empathy. Systems were evaluated using both reference-based metrics (Distinct-2 and BERTScore-F1) and rubric-based human evaluation metrics measuring politeness (PRS), quality (QS), and contextual coherence (CCNC). The results demonstrate variation in system performance across languages, with English systems showing stronger lexical diversity and Tamil systems excelling in politeness and contextual coherence. This paper presents dataset statistics, evaluation methodology, system performance analysis, and key observations from the shared task.

This paper presents an overview of the Multi-Level Political Meme Classification shared task conducted at DravidianLangTech–ACL 2026. The task introduces a hierarchical two-level classification framework for Tamil and Malayalam political memes: Level 1 focuses on stance detection (Support/Praise vs. Troll/Oppose), while Level 2 identifies the political target (individual or party), conditioned on the predicted stance. The dataset was curated from social media platforms and manually annotated with strong inter-annotator agreement. A total of 64 teams registered and 19 teams submitted their results using diverse multimodal approaches combining transformer-based text encoders, vision models, OCR pipelines, and hierarchical architectures. Results show that stance detection achieves high macro-F1 scores across both languages, whereas target identification remains more challenging, particularly in Malayalam. The findings highlight the importance of multimodal fusion, hierarchical reasoning, and robustness to OCR noise and class imbalance in political meme analysis.

The widespread use of social media has made it easier for false information to proliferate, particularly racially motivated hoaxes that can encourage violence and hatred. Such content is frequently shared in code-mixed languages in multilingual nations like India, which presents special difficulties for automated detection systems because of the casual language, erratic grammar, and rich cultural background. The shared task on detecting racial hoaxes in code mixed social media data aims to identify the racial hoaxes in Hindi-English data. It is a binary classification task with more than 5,000 labeled instances. A total of 11 teams participated in the task, and the results are evaluated using the macro-F1 score. The team that employed XLM-RoBERTa secured the first position in the task.

Hope serves as a powerful driving force that encourages individuals to persevere in the face of the unpredictable nature of human existence. It instills motivation within us to remain steadfast in our pursuit of important goals, regardless of the uncertainties that lie ahead. In today’s digital age, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have emerged as prominent social media outlets where people freely express their views and opinions. These platforms have also become crucial for marginalized individuals seeking online assistance and support[1][2][3]. The outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated people’s fears around the world, as they grapple with the possibility of losing loved ones and the lack of access to essential services such as schools, hospitals, and mental health facilities.

This paper manifest the overview of the shared task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable individuals in Tamil(LT-EDI-ACL2023). Task is provided with an Tamil dataset, which is collected from elderly people of three different genders, male, female and transgender. The audio samples were recorded from the public locations like hospitals, markets, vegetable shop, etc. The dataset is released in two phase, training and testing phase. The partcipants were asked to use different models and methods to handle audio signals and submit the result as transcription of the test samples given. The result submitted by the participants was evaluated using WER (Word Error Rate). The participants used the transformer-based model for automatic speech recognition. The results and different pre-trained transformer based models used by the participants is discussed in this overview paper.

Our research aims to address the task of detecting homophobia and transphobia in social media code-mixed comments written in Spanish. Code-mixed text in social media often violates strict grammar rules and incorporates non-native scripts, posing challenges for identification. To tackle this problem, we perform pre-processing by removing unnecessary content and establishing a baseline for detecting homophobia and transphobia. Furthermore, we explore the effectiveness of various traditional machine-learning models with feature extraction and pre-trained transformer model techniques. Our best configurations achieve macro F1 scores of 0.84 on the test set and 0.82 on the development set for Spanish, demonstrating promising results in detecting instances of homophobia and transphobia in code-mixed comments.

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on Sentiment Analysis (SA) of code-mixed Dravidian languages. However, the majority of social media text in these languages is code-mixed, presenting a unique challenge. Despite this, there is currently lack of research on SA specifically tailored for code-mixed Dravidian languages, highlighting the need for further exploration and development in this domain. In this view, “Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu- DravidianLangTech” shared task at Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP)- 2023 is organized. This shred consists two language tracks: code-mixed Tamil and Tulu and Tulu text is first ever explored in public domain for SA. We describe the task, its organization, and the submitted systems followed by the results. 57 research teams registered for the shared task and We received 27 systems each for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts. The performance of the systems (developed by participants) has been evaluated in terms of macro average F1 score. The top system for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts scored macro average F1 score of 0.32, and 0.542 respectively. The high quality and substantial quantity of submissions demonstrate a significant interest and attention in the analysis of code-mixed Dravidian languages. However, the current state of the art in this domain indicates the need for further advancements and improvements to effectively address the challenges posed by code-mixed Dravidian language SA.

This paper discusses the submissions to the shared task on abusive comment detection in Tamil and Telugu codemixed social media text conducted as part of the third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at RANLP 20239. The task encourages researchers to develop models to detect the contents containing abusive information in Tamil and Telugu codemixed social media text. The task has three subtasks - abusive comment detection in Tamil, Tamil-English and Telugu-English. The dataset for all the tasks was developed by collecting comments from YouTube. The submitted models were evaluated using macro F1-score, and prepared the rank list accordingly.

Hope Speech detection is the task of classifying a sentence as hope speech or non-hope speech given a corpus of sentences. Hope speech is any message or content that is positive, encouraging, reassuring, inclusive and supportive that inspires and engenders optimism in the minds of people. In contrast to identifying and censoring negative speech patterns, hope speech detection is focussed on recognising and promoting positive speech patterns online. In this paper, we report an overview of the findings and results from the shared task on hope speech detection for Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Spanish languages conducted in the second workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2022) organised as a part of ACL 2022. The participants were provided with annotated training & development datasets and unlabelled test datasets in all the five languages. The goal of the shared task is to classify the given sentences into one of the two hope speech classes. The performances of the systems submitted by the participants were evaluated in terms of micro-F1 score and weighted-F1 score. The datasets for this challenge are openly available

This paper illustrates the overview of the sharedtask on automatic speech recognition in the Tamillanguage. In the shared task, spontaneousTamil speech data gathered from elderly andtransgender people was given for recognitionand evaluation. These utterances were collected from people when they communicatedin the public locations such as hospitals, markets, vegetable shop, etc. The speech corpusincludes utterances of male, female, and transgender and was split into training and testingdata. The given task was evaluated using WER(Word Error Rate). The participants used thetransformer-based model for automatic speechrecognition. Different results using differentpre-trained transformer models are discussedin this overview paper.

The social media is one of the significantdigital platforms that create a huge im-pact in peoples of all levels. The commentsposted on social media is powerful enoughto even change the political and businessscenarios in very few hours. They alsotend to attack a particular individual ora group of individuals. This shared taskaims at detecting the abusive comments in-volving, Homophobia, Misandry, Counter-speech, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Transpho-bic. The hope speech is also identified. Adataset collected from social media taggedwith the above said categories in Tamiland Tamil-English code-mixed languagesare given to the participants. The par-ticipants used different machine learningand deep learning algorithms. This paperpresents the overview of this task compris-ing the dataset details and results of theparticipants.

This paper presents the overview of the shared task on emotional analysis in Tamil. The result of the shared task is presented at the workshop. This paper presents the dataset used in the shared task, task description, and the methodology used by the participants and the evaluation results of the submission. This task is organized as two Tasks. Task A is carried with 11 emotions annotated data for social media comments in Tamil and Task B is organized with 31 fine-grained emotion annotated data for social media comments in Tamil. For conducting experiments, training and development datasets were provided to the participants and results are evaluated for the unseen data. Totally we have received around 24 submissions from 13 teams. For evaluating the models, Precision, Recall, micro average metrics are used.

Due to the exponential increasing reach of social media, it is essential to focus on its negative aspects as it can potentially divide society and incite people into violence. In this paper, we present our system description of work on the shared task ComMA@ICON, where we have to classify how aggressive the sentence is and if the sentence is gender-biased or communal biased. These three could be the primary reasons to cause significant problems in society. Our approach utilizes different pretrained models with Attention and mean pooling methods. We were able to get Rank 1 with 0.253 Instance F1 score on Bengali, Rank 2 with 0.323 Instance F1 score on multilingual set, Rank 4 with 0.129 Instance F1 score on meitei and Rank 5 with 0.336 Instance F1 score on Hindi. The source code and the pretrained models of this work can be found here.

Uvama urubugal in Tamil are used to explain a particular context by citing another equivalent context. This is referred to as “Uvamaiyani” in Tamil Grammar rules as stated in Tholkappiam. The is called as simile in English. Similes bring out many beautiful poetic contexts. Automatic extraction of such similes can help to build better Natural Language Generation applications such as, story generation systems and lyric suggestion systems. This paper attempts to automatically extract the uvama urubugal from Tamil Sangam Literatures. Natrinai and Mullai Pattu have been used for the analysis. There are 12 uvama urupugal in Tamil as per Nanool and this paper has attempted to analyze the usage of these 12 uvama urubugal in Sangam Literatures and compares their usage distribution in the Tamil Film songs data set comprising of 4215 songs. It was found that only two uvama urubugal were used in the current-day Tamil Film songs. This comparison was done to reveal the diminishing usage of these beautiful uvama urubugal by the current generation and the urge to use them again.

Thirukkural is one of the famous Tamil Literatures in the world. It was written by Thiruvalluvar, and focuses on ethics and morality. It provides all possible solutions to lead a successful and a peaceful life fitting any generation. It has been translated into 82 global languages, which necessitate the access of Thirukkural in any language on the World Wide Web (WWW) and processing the Thirukkural computationally. This paper aims at constructing the Thirukkural Discourse Parser which finds the semantic relations in the Thirukkurals which can extract the hidden meaning in it and help in utilizing the same in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as, Summary Generation Systems, Information Retrieval (IR) Systems and Question Answering (QA) Systems. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is one of the discourse theories, which is used in NLP to find the coherence between texts. This paper finds the relation within the Thriukkurals and the discourse structure is created using the Thirukkural Discourse Parser. The resultant discourse structure of Thirukkural can be indexed and further be used by Summary Generation Systems, IR Systems and QA Systems. This facilitates the end user to access Thirukkural on WWW and get benefited. This Thirukkural Discourse Parser has been tested with all 1330 Thirukurals using precision and recall.