One_by_zero@ NLU of Devanagari Script Languages 2025: Target Identification for Hate Speech Leveraging Transformer-based Approach

AbstractPeople often use written words to spread hate aimed at different groups that cannot be practically detected manually. Therefore, developing an automatic system capable of identifying hate speech is crucial. However, creating such a system in a low-resourced languages (LRLs) script like Devanagari becomes challenging. Hence, the Devanagari script has organized a shared task targeting hate speech identification. This work proposes a pre-trained transformer-based model to identify the target of hate speech, classifying it as directed toward an individual, organization, or community. We performed extensive experiments, exploring various machine learning (LR, SVM, and ensemble), deep learning (CNN, LSTM, CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (IndicBERT, mBERT, MuRIL, XLM-R) to identify hate speech. Experimental results indicate that the IndicBERT model achieved the highest performance among all other models, obtaining a macro F1-score of 0.6785, which placed the team 6th in the task.