Increasingly, more and more people are turning to large language models (LLMs) for healthcare advice and consultation, making it important to gauge the efficacy and accuracy of the responses of LLMs to such queries. While there are pre-existing medical benchmarks literature which seeks to accomplish this very task, these benchmarks are almost universally in English, which has led to a notable gap in existing literature pertaining to multilingual LLM evaluation. Within this work, we seek to aid in addressing this gap with Cancer-Myth-Indic, an Indic language benchmark built by translating a 500-item subset of Cancer-Myth, sampled evenly across its original categories, into five under-served but widely used languages from the subcontinent (500 per language; 2,500 translated items total). Native-speaker translators followed a style guide for preserving implicit presuppositions in translation; items feature false presuppositions relating to cancer. We evaluate several popular LLMs under this presupposition stress.

This work introduces UnityAI-Guard, a framework for binary toxicity classification targeting low-resource Indian languages. While existing systems predominantly cater to high-resource languages, UnityAI-Guard addresses this critical gap by developing state-of-the-art models for identifying toxic content across diverse Brahmic/Indic scripts. Our approach achieves an impressive average F1-score of 84.23% across seven languages, leveraging a dataset of 888k training instances and 35k manually verified test instances. By advancing multilingual content moderation for linguistically diverse regions, UnityAI-Guard also provides public API access to foster broader adoption and application.

This paper presents the systems and results for the Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages (MSMDA-DL) shared task at the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages (DravidianLangTech-2025). We took a `bag-of-sounds' approach by training our hate speech detection system on the speech (audio) data using transformed Mel spectrogram measures. While our candidate model performed poorly on the test set, our approach offered promising results during training and development for Malayalam and Tamil. With sufficient and well-balanced training data, our results show that it is feasible to use both text and speech (audio) data in the development of multimodal hate speech detection systems.

The rise of Generative AI has led to a surge in AI-generated reviews, often posing a serious threat to the credibility of online platforms. Reviews serve as the primary source of information about products and services. Authentic reviews play a vital role in consumer decision-making. The presence of fabricated content misleads consumers, undermines trust and facilitates potential fraud in digital marketplaces. This study focuses on detecting AI-generated product reviews in Tamil and Malayalam, two low-resource languages where research in this domain is relatively under-explored. We worked on a range of approaches - from traditional machine learning methods to advanced transformer-based models such as Indic-BERT, IndicSBERT, MuRIL, XLM-RoBERTa and MalayalamBERT. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of leveraging the state-of-the-art transformers in accurately identifying AI-generated content, demonstrating the potential in enhancing the detection of fake reviews in low-resource language settings.

Language Identification (LI) is crucial for various natural language processing tasks, serving as a foundational step in applications such as sentiment analysis, machine translation, and information retrieval. In multilingual societies like India, particularly among the youth engaging on social media, text often exhibits code-mixing, blending local languages with English at different linguistic levels. This phenomenon presents formidable challenges for LI systems, especially when languages intermingle within single words. Dravidian languages, prevalent in southern India, possess rich morphological structures yet suffer from under-representation in digital platforms, leading to the adoption of Roman or hybrid scripts for communication. This paper introduces a prompt based method for a shared task aimed at addressing word-level LI challenges in Dravidian languages. In this work, we leveraged GPT-3.5 Turbo to understand whether the large language models is able to correctly classify words into correct categories. Our findings show that the Kannada model consistently outperformed the Tamil model across most metrics, indicating a higher accuracy and reliability in identifying and categorizing Kannada language instances. In contrast, the Tamil model showed moderate performance, particularly needing improvement in precision and recall.

Stress is a common feeling in daily life, but it can affect mental well-being in some situations, the development of robust detection models is imperative. This study introduces a methodical approach to the stress identification in code-mixed texts for Dravidian languages. The challenge encompassed two datasets, targeting Tamil and Telugu languages respectively. This proposal underscores the importance of using uncleaned text as a benchmark to refine future classification methodologies, incorporating diverse preprocessing techniques. Random Forest algorithm was used, featuring three textual representations: TF-IDF, Uni-grams of words, and a composite of (1+2+3)-Grams of characters. The approach achieved a good performance for both linguistic categories, achieving a Macro F1-score of 0.734 in Tamil and 0.727 in Telugu, overpassing results achieved with different complex techniques such as FastText and Transformer models. The results underscore the value of uncleaned data for mental state detection and the challenges classifying code-mixed texts for stress, indicating the potential for improved performance through cleaning data, other preprocessing techniques, or more complex models.

Language identification is used as the first step in many data collection and crawling efforts because it allows us to sort online text into language-specific buckets. However, many modern languages, such as Konkani, Kashmiri, Punjabi etc., are synchronically written in several scripts. Moreover, languages with different writing systems do not share significant lexical, semantic, and syntactic properties in neural representation spaces, which is a disadvantage for closely related languages and low-resource languages, especially those from the Indian Subcontinent. To counter this, we propose learning script-agnostic representations using several different experimental strategies (upscaling, flattening, and script mixing) focusing on four major Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam). We find that word-level script randomization and exposure to a language written in multiple scripts is extremely valuable for downstream script-agnostic language identification, while also maintaining competitive performance on naturally occurring text.

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project aims to create a cross-linguistically consistent dependency annotation for multiple languages, to facilitate multilingual NLP. It currently supports 114 languages. Dravidian languages are spoken by over 200 million people across the word, and yet there are only two languages from this family in UD. This paper examines some of the morphological and syntactic features of Dravidian languages and explores how they can be annotated in the UD framework.

We present the first parallel dataset for English-Tulu translation. Tulu, classified within the South Dravidian linguistic family branch, is predominantly spoken by approximately 2.5 million individuals in southwestern India. Our dataset is constructed by integrating human translations into the multilingual machine translation resource FLORES-200. Furthermore, we use this dataset for evaluation purposes in developing our English-Tulu machine translation model. For the model's training, we leverage resources available for related South Dravidian languages. We adopt a transfer learning approach that exploits similarities between high-resource and low-resource languages. This method enables the training of a machine translation system even in the absence of parallel data between the source and target language, thereby overcoming a significant obstacle in machine translation development for low-resource languages. Our English-Tulu system, trained without using parallel English-Tulu data, outperforms Google Translate by 19 BLEU points (in September 2023).

Current research in zero-shot translation is plagued by several issues such as high compute requirements, increased training time and off target translations. Proposed remedies often come at the cost of additional data or compute requirements. Pivot based neural machine translation is preferred over a single-encoder model for most settings despite the increased training and evaluation time. In this work, we overcome the shortcomings of zero-shot translation by taking advantage of transliteration and linguistic similarity. We build a single encoder-decoder neural machine translation system for Dravidian-Dravidian multilingual translation and perform zero-shot translation. We compare the data vs zero-shot accuracy tradeoff and evaluate the performance of our vanilla method against the current state of the art pivot based method. We also test the theory that morphologically rich languages require large vocabularies by restricting the vocabulary using an optimal transport based technique. Our model manages to achieves scores within 3 BLEU of large-scale pivot-based models when it is trained on 50\% of the language directions.