byteLLM@LT-EDI-2024: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments - Custom Subword Tokenization with Subword2Vec and BiLSTM

AbstractThis research focuses on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Dravidian languages, specifically Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam. Leveraging the Homophobia/ Transphobia Detection dataset, we propose an innovative approach employing a custom-designed tokenizer with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) architecture. Our distinctive contribution lies in a tokenizer that reduces model sizes to below 7MB, improving efficiency and addressing real-time deployment challenges. The BiLSTM implementation demonstrates significant enhancements in hate speech detection accuracy, effectively capturing linguistic nuances. Low-size models efficiently alleviate inference challenges, ensuring swift real-time detection and practical deployment. This work pioneers a framework for hate speech detection, providing insights into model size, inference speed, and real-time deployment challenges in combatting online hate speech within Dravidian languages.