Team_Catalysts@DravidianLangTech 2025: Leveraging Political Sentiment Analysis using Machine Learning Techniques for Classifying Tamil Tweets

AbstractThis work proposed a methodology for assessing political sentiments in Tamil tweets using machine learning models. The approach addressed linguistic challenges in Tamil text, including cleaning, normalization, tokenization, and class imbalance, through a robust preprocessing pipeline. Various models, including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and CatBoost, were applied, with Random Forest achieving a macro F1-score of 0.2933 and securing 8th rank among 153 participants in the Codalab competition. This accomplishment highlights the effectiveness of machine learning models in handling the complexities of multilingual, code-mixed, and unstructured data in Tamil political discourse. The study also emphasized the importance of tailored preprocessing techniques to improve model accuracy and performance. It demonstrated the potential of computational linguistics and machine learning in understanding political discourse in low-resource languages like Tamil, contributing to advancements in regional sentiment analysis.