MACD: Multilingual Abusive Comment Detection at Scale for Indic Languages

Social media platforms were conceived to act as online'town squares' where people could get together, share information and communicate with each other peacefully. However, harmful content borne out of bad actors are constantly plaguing these platforms slowly converting them into'mosh pits' where the bad actors take the liberty to extensively abuse various marginalised groups. Accurate and timely detection of abusive content on social media platforms is therefore very important for facilitating safe interactions between users. However, due to the small scale and sparse linguistic coverage of Indic abusive speech datasets, development of such algorithms for Indic social media users (one-sixth of global population) is severely impeded.