Stop the Hate, Spread the Hope: An Ensemble Model for Hope Speech Detection in English and Dravidian Languages

The rise of social media has led to vast amounts of user-generated content, with emotions ranging from joy to anger. Negative comments often target individuals, communities, or brands, prompting successful efforts to detect harmful speech such as hate speech, cyberbullying, and abuse. Recently, another type of speech referred to as ‘Hope Speech’ has gained attention from the research community. Hope speech consists of positive affirmations or words of reassurance, encouragement, consolation or motivation offered to the affected individual/ community during the lean periods of life. However, there has been relatively less research focused on the detection of hope speech, more particularly in low-resource languages. This paper, therefore, attempts to develop an ensemble model for detecting hope speech in some low-resource languages. Data for four different languages, namely English, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil are obtained and experimented with different deep learning-based models. An ensemble model is proposed to combine the advantages of the better performing models. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed Ensemble (LSTM, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa) model compared to individual models based on data from all four languages (weighted average F1-score for English is 0.93; for Kannada is 0.74; for Malayalam is 0.82; and for Tamil is 0.60). Thus, the proposed ensemble model proves to be a suitable approach for hope speech detection in the given low resource languages.