It’s been a while—almost three months since my last post. Definitely not my usual pace. I wanted to check in and share why the blog has been a bit quiet recently—and more importantly, what I’ve been working on behind the scenes.
First, April and May were a whirlwind: I had seven AP exams, school finals, and was deep in preparation for the VEX Robotics World Championship. Balancing school with intense robotics scrimmages and code debugging meant there were a lot of late nights and early mornings—and not much time to write.
But the biggest reason for the radio silence? I’ve been working on a research paper that got accepted to NAACL 2025.
Our NAACL 2025 Paper: “A Bag-of-Sounds Approach to Multimodal Hate Speech Detection”
Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to co-author a paper with Dr. Sidney Wong, focusing on multimodal hate speech detection using audio data. The paper was accepted to the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at NAACL 2025.
You can read the full paper here:
👉 A Bag-of-Sounds Approach to Multimodal Hate Speech Detection
What we did:
We explored a “bag-of-sounds” method, training our model on Mel spectrogram features extracted from spoken social media content in Dravidian languages—specifically Malayalam and Tamil. Unlike most hate speech systems that rely solely on text, we wanted to see how well speech-based signals alone could perform.
How it went:
The results were mixed. Our system didn’t perform great on the final test set—but on the training and dev sets, we saw promise. The takeaway? With enough balanced and labeled audio data, speech can absolutely play a role in multimodal hate speech detection systems. It’s a step toward understanding language in more realistic, cross-modal contexts.
More importantly, this project helped me dive into the intersection of language, sound, and AI—and reminded me just how much we still have to learn when it comes to processing speech from low-resource languages.
Thanks for sticking around even when the blog went quiet. I’ll be back soon with a post about my experience at the VEX Robotics World Championship—stay tuned!
— Andrew
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