To obtain extensive annotated data for underresourced languages is challenging, so in this research, we have investigated whether it is beneficial to train models using multi-task learning. Sentiment analysis and offensive language identification share similar discourse properties. The selection of these tasks is motivated by the lack of large labelled data for user-generated code-mixed datasets. This paper works on code-mixed YouTube comments for Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada languages. Our framework is applicable to other sequence classification problems irrespective of the size of the datasets. Experiments show that our multi-task learning model can achieve high results compared with single-task learning while reducing the time and space constraints required to train the models on individual

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Social media has effectively become the prime hub of communication and digital marketing. As these platforms enable the free manifestation of thoughts and facts in text, images and video, there is an extensive need to screen them to protect individuals and groups from offensive content targeted at them. Our work intends to classify code-mixed social media comments/posts in the Dravidian languages of Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. We intend to improve offensive language identification by generating pseudo-labels on the dataset. A custom dataset is constructed by transliterating all the code-mixed texts into the respective Dravidian language, either Kannada, Malayalam, or Tamil and then generating pseudo-labels for the transliterated dataset. The two datasets are combined using the generated pseudo-labels to create a custom dataset called CM-TRA. As Dravidian languages are under-resourced, our approach increases the amount of training data for the language models. We fine-tune several recent pretrained language models on the newly constructed dataset. We extract the pretrained language embeddings and pass them onto recurrent neural networks. We observe that fine-tuning ULMFiT on the custom dataset yields the best results on the code-mixed test sets of all three languages. Our approach yields the best results among the benchmarked models on Tamil-English, achieving a weighted F1-Score of 0.7934 while scoring competitive weighted F1-Scores of 0.9624 and 0.7306 on the code-mixed test sets of Malayalam-English and Kannada-English, respectively. The data and codes for the approaches discussed in our work have been released 1 .1 https://github.com/adeepH/Dravidian-OLI *

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