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Depression is a major mental health concern that can be reflected through subtle changes in speech patterns, prosody, and vocal characteristics. In low-resource and multilingual settings, depression detection from speech may become particularly more challenging. In this work, we present our system for the Shared Task on Depression Detection from Malayalam and Tamil. We explored both handcrafted acoustic features (MFCC) and pretrained speech representations (Wav2Vec2) for depression detection, along with a simple fusion strategy to examine their complementary strengths. Our observations showed that Wav2Vec2 generalized better for Malayalam, whereas for Tamil, a validation-tuned probability fusion performed best. The final system achieved macro-F1 scores of 99.5% for Malayalam and 88.6% for Tamil, securing 3rd place in both tasks.

ACL 2026

TriVector@DravidianLangTech 2026: Depression Detection from Tamil and Malayalam Speech with Speaker-Independent Evaluation using MFCC and Wav2Vec2

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

This paper presents an overview of the Shared Task on Prompt Recovery for Large Language Models (LLMs) in Telugu, organized as part of DravidianLangTech @ ACL 2026. The task focuses on identifying the underlying communicative style of Telugu text excerpts, framed as a nine-class single-label classification problem covering Formal, Informal, Optimistic, Pessimistic, Humorous, Serious, Inspiring, Authoritative, and Persuasive tones. The dataset was constructed by collecting Telugu YouTube comments and generating style-modified variants using an LLM, resulting in 3,000 training instances, 300 validation samples, and 301 test samples. A total of 52 teams registered for the shared task, with 13 teams submitting valid system predictions. Systems explored diverse approaches, including transformer-based fine-tuning (IndicBERT, MuRIL, XLM-R), ensemble and stacking methods, pairwise modeling strategies, curriculum learning, and few-shot large language model prompting. Evaluation was conducted using Macro F1-score as the primary metric. The top-performing system achieved a Macro F1-score of 0.2987. Overall results indicate that Telugu prompt-style recovery remains a challenging problem, particularly due to stylistic overlap and high lexical similarity across classes.

Shared Task on Prompt Style Recovery for Large Language Models in Telugu

This paper presents our systems and results for the Hope Speech Detection in Code-Mixed Tulu Language shared task at the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages (DravidianLangTech-2026). We trained an XLM-RoBERTa-based text classification system for detecting hope speech in code-mixed Tulu social media comments. We compared this organically adapted hope speech detection model with our baseline model. On the development set, the organically adapted model outperformed the baseline system. While our submitted systems performed more modestly on the official test set, these results suggest that further adapting XLM-RoBERTa on organically collected Tulu social media text containing code-mixed and mixed-script variation can improve hope speech detection in code-mixed Tulu.

cantnlp@DravidianLangTech 2026: organic domain adaptation improves multi-class hope speech detection in Tulu

Depression is one of the most common mental health problems in the world. It affects a person’s emotions, thinking, energy levels, and daily life. Early detection of depression is very important to provide timely support and treatment. While many studies focus on identifying depression from text, speech also carries important emotional and psychological signals that are often not fully explored. This paper presents an overview of the shared task on Depression Detection in Dravidian Languages (DD- DL). The task focuses on identifying signs of depression from speech data in two low-resource Dravidian languages: Tamil and Malayalam. Participants were provided with curated training datasets and were asked to build systems to classify speech samples as Depressed or Non-Depressed. The shared task includes two subtasks: (1) Depression detection in Tamil and (2) Depression detection in Malayalam. Participants applied various machine learning and deep learning approaches to model the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of speech. All submissions were evaluated using the macro-F1 score, which ensures fair performance measurement across classes

Shared Task on Depression Detection from Malayalam and Tamil Speech Data

Our proposal for the Dravidian LangTech 2026 Tamil Political Sentiment Analysis job is outlined in this document. Seven categories—substantiated, sarcastic, opinionated, positive, negative, neutral, and none of the above—should be used to classify Tamil political remarks according to their attitudes. Classifying the sentiments of Tamil political utterances is quite difficult. Furthermore, the emotions associated with various identities are not distributed uniformly. We built an ensemble of two transformer-based techniques, XLM-RoBERTa and IndicBERT, and used 10-fold cross-validation to improve the model’s dependability and prevent overfitting in order to address some of these issues while finishing this research. In order to help the model concentrate more on the challenging examples, used oversampling to address class imbalance and Focal Loss to train the model. In order to improve the representation of sentences, finally averaged the token embeddings.

ByteBuilders@DravidianLangTech 2026: Transformer-Based Weighted Ensemble for Political Multiclass Sentiment Analysis of Tamil X (Twitter) Comments

The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to a substantial increase in user-generated content, including abusive and offensive language. Detecting abusive content becomes particularly challenging in low-resource and code-mixed language settings such as Telugu-English social media text. Code-mixed content involves transliteration, inconsistent spelling variations, informal expressions, and frequent language switching within a single sentence. This paper focuses on detecting abusive content in Telugu-English code-mixed comments using both traditional machine learning and transformer-based deep learning models. The proposed approach incorporates preprocessing strategies to normalize transliterations and spelling variations, hybrid feature extraction techniques combining TF-IDF and FastText embeddings, and fine-tuning of multilingual transformer models. The study addresses challenges such as morphological complexity, contextual ambiguity, and limited annotated data in low-resource NLP environments.

Abusive Content Detection in Telugu-English Code-Mixed Social Media Using Hybrid Transformer Architectures

Low-resource languages pose significant challenges for speech technology due to linguistic variation and limited annotated resources. One such language is Tamil, which is a morphologically rich language with significant dialectal variations, which makes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and dialect classification a challenging task. In this article, we introduce a shared-task system for handling Speech Processing in Tamil Language covering both ASR and Dialect classification. We use the Whisper Large-v3 multilingual model in a zero-shot setting without task-specific fine-tuning. For dialect classification, we employ a pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model to extract acoustic features and mean and standard deviation pooling to create utterance-level representations, with an XGBoost model trained for four-way prediction of dialects. Experiments on 579 Tamil speech samples resulted in a word error rate (WER) of 0.61, highlighting the difficulty of the dialectal ASR problem in low- resource setting. The dialect classification system obtained an accuracy of 0.49 and a macro F1 score of 0.41, and there was a certain amount of confusion between the dialect classes. The proposed system is purely based on the standard pretrained models without adaptation, but has produced a benchmark that can be replicated in the multilingual speech representation evaluation of Tamil low-resource scenarios. The results also indicate the need for additional strategies to improve the robustness of the model and stronger baseline models and improved methods for embedding-based dialect classification for future research.

AITamilDialect@DravidianLangTech 2026: Zero-Shot Whisper and Wav2Vec2 Embedding-Based Tamil Speech Recognition and Dialect Classification.

It is difficult to detect abusive language, particularly in social networks for low-resource languages like Tamil. Spelling errors, informal expressions and code-mixing make it even more challenging to read text from social media. The current work proposes a multilingual transformer-based approach to detect abusive content in Tamil text. A pretrained XLM-RoBERTa model is used to learn contextual and semantic representations from the input text. This is a general pipeline comprising preprocessing, tokenization, and binary classification (abusive / non-abusive). Experiments are performed on Tamil social media datasets that have abusive and non-abusive data. The results reveal that multilingual transformer models achieve good performance in low-resource scenarios. The proposed model attains an F1-score of 78.64%, which shows the potential of using cross-lingual pretrained models for the detection of abusive Tamil language.

TAMILGOODBADTXT@DravidianLangTech 2026:A Multilingual Transformer-Based Approach for Abusive Language Identification in Tamil Social Media

The proliferation of misogynistic content on social media platforms is a serious problem that requires the development of automated detection systems, which is a challenging task for low-resource languages like Tamil. This study investigates the effectiveness of multilingual transformer models for identifying abusive Tamil text targeting women in social media. Results indicate that such models achieve strong baseline performance on this task. Furthermore, an ensemble of two best performing models was found to improve the classification performance further. The results also highlighted the significance of domain-specific pre-training for improving classifier performance. The best performing ensemble model achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.83 on the test set, placing our approach in first position in the shared task.

NITC-HSR@DravidianLangTech 2026: Ensembling Multilingual Transformer Models for Detecting Abusive Tamil Text Targeting Women on Social Media

Political memes are widely used to express opinions, sarcasm, and ideological narratives on social media platforms. However, detecting political trolling in low-resource languages such as Tamil and Malayalam remains challenging due to limited datasets and tools. To address this problem, DravidianLangTech@ACL 2026 organized a shared task on hierarchical political meme classification.

This work explores text-only models, classical multimodal fusion, and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for Tamil and Malayalam political meme classification. Our experiments include IndicBERTv2, XLM-RoBERTa, EfficientNet-based multimodal fusion, and Qwen-VL models. Among the submitted systems, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct with 4-bit QLoRA fine-tuning achieved competitive performance, ranking 3rd in the Malayalam track and 4th in the Tamil track based on weighted-F1 score. Additional post-evaluation experiments with Qwen3-VL-8B further improved macro-F1 performance, highlighting the effectiveness of VLMs for low-resource multilingual political meme classification.

Semantica@DravidianLangTech 2026: Vision-Language Models for Hierarchical Political Meme Classification in Tamil and Malayalam

The increasing prevalence of social media has also correlated with an increase in abusive content targeting women, particularly for regional languages such as Tamil. The automatic identification of abusive content is critical for the creation of safer online spaces. In this paper, we focus on the abusive text detection of women in the context of binary text classification. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system on the abusive text detection of women using the IndicBERT, MuRIL, and Tamil-BERT models. Additionally, we propose the use of grapheme-aware normalization for the proposed system. Grapheme-aware normalization aims to maintain the structural integrity of Tamil characters at the Unicode level. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system using the Tamil-BERT model with grapheme-aware normalization achieves the best performance among the evaluated models. The proposed system achieved the third position in the shared task.

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