CUET-NLP_Big_O@DravidianLangTech 2025: A Multimodal Fusion-based Approach for Identifying Misogyny Memes

AbstractMemes have become one of the main mediums for expressing ideas, humor, and opinions through visual-textual content on social media. The same medium has been used to propagate harmful ideologies, such as misogyny, that undermine gender equality and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Identifying misogynistic memes is particularly challenging in low-resource languages (LRLs), such as Tamil and Malayalam, due to the scarcity of annotated datasets and sophisticated tools. Therefore, DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025 launched a Shared Task on Misogyny Meme Detection to identify misogyny memes. For this task, this work exploited an extensive array of models, including machine learning (LR, RF, SVM, and XGBoost), and deep learning (CNN, BiLSTM+CNN, CNN+GRU, and LSTM) are explored to extract textual features, while CNN, BiLSTM + CNN, ResNet50, and DenseNet121 are utilized for visual features.Furthermore, we have explored feature-level and decision-level fusion techniques with several model combinations like MuRIL with ResNet50, MuRIL with BiLSTM+CNN, T5+MuRIL with ResNet50, and mBERT with ResNet50. The evaluation results demonstrated that BERT + ResNet50 performed best, obtaining an F1 score of 0.81716 (Tamil) and were ranked 2nd in the task. The early fusion of MuRIL+ResNet50 showed the highest F1 score of 0.82531 and received a 9th rank in Malayalam.