This paper aims to describe the approach we used to detect hope speech in the HopeEDI dataset. We experimented with two approaches. In the first approach, we used contextual embeddings to train classifiers using logistic regression, random forest, SV
M, and LSTM based models. The second approach involved using a majority voting ensemble of 11 models which were obtained by fine-tuning pre-trained transformer models (BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa, IndicBERT) after adding an output layer. We found that the second approach was superior for English, Tamil and Malayalam. Our solution got a weighted F1 score of 0.93, 0.75 and 0.49 for English, Malayalam and Tamil respectively. Our solution ranked 1st in English, 8th in Malayalam and 11th in Tamil.
Analysis and deciphering code-mixed data is imperative in academia and industry, in a multilingual country like India, in order to solve problems apropos Natural Language Processing. This paper proposes a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM)
with the attention-based approach, in solving the hope speech detection problem. Using this approach an F1-score of 0.73 (9thrank) in the Malayalam-English data set was achieved from a total of 31 teams who participated in the competition.
