cuetRaptors@DravidianLangTech 2025: Transformer-Based Approaches for Detecting Abusive Tamil Text Targeting Women on Social Media

AbstractWith the exponential growth of social media usage, the prevalence of abusive language targeting women has become a pressing issue, particularly in low-resource languages (LRLs) like Tamil and Malayalam. This study is part of the shared task at DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025, which focuses on detecting abusive comments in Tamil social media content. The provided dataset consists of binary-labeled comments (Abusive or Non-Abusive), gathered from YouTube, reflecting explicit abuse, implicit bias, stereotypes, and coded language. We developed and evaluated multiple models for this task, including traditional machine learning algorithms (Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest Classifier, and Multinomial Naive Bayes), deep learning models (CNN, BiLSTM, and CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based architectures (DistilBERT, Multilingual BERT, XLM-RoBERTa), and fine-tuned variants of these models. Our best-performing model, Multilingual BERT, achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.7203, ranking 19 in the competition.