HTMS@DravidianLangTech 2025: Fusing TF-IDF and BERT with Dimensionality Reduction for Abusive Language Detection in Tamil and Malayalam

AbstractDetecting abusive and similarly toxic content posted on a social media platform is challenging due to the complexities of the language, data imbalance, and the code-mixed nature of the text. In this paper, we present our submissions for the shared task on abusive Tamil and Malayalam texts targeting women on social media—DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025. We propose a hybrid embedding model that integrates embeddings generated using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and BERT. To get rid of the differences in the embedding dimensions, we used a dimensionality reduction method with TF-IDF embedding. We submitted two more runs to the shared task, which involve a model based on TF-IDF embedding and another based on BERT-based embedding. The code for the submissions is available at https://github.com/Tarrruh/NLP_HTMS.