KEC_AI_BRIGHTRED@DravidianLangTech 2025: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Dravidian languages

AbstractHate speech detection in multilingual settings presents significant challenges due to linguistic variations and speech patterns across different languages. This study proposes a fusion-based approach that integrates audio and text features to enhance classification accuracy in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. We extract Mel- Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and their delta variations for speech representation, while textbased features contribute additional linguistic insights. Several models were evaluated, including BiLSTM, Capsule Networks with Attention, Capsule-GRU, ConvLSTM-BiLSTM, and Multinomial Naïve Bayes, to determine the most effective architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that Random Forest performs best for text classification, while CNN achieves the highest accuracy for audio classification. The model was evaluated using the Macro F1 score and ranked ninth in Tamil with a score of 0.3018, ninth in Telugu with a score of 0.251, and thirteenth in Malayalam with a score of 0.2782 in the Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages shared task at DravidianLangTech@NAACL 2025. By leveraging feature fusion and optimized model selection, this approach provides a scalable and effective framework for multilingual hate speech detection, contributing to improved content moderation on social media platforms.