IIIT_DWD@EACL2021: Identifying Troll Meme in Tamil using a hybrid deep learning approach

Social media are an open forum that allows people to share their knowledge, abilities, talents, ideas, or expressions. Simultaneously, it also allows people to post disrespectful, trolling, defamation, or negative content targeting users or the community based on their gender, race, religious beliefs, etc. Such posts are available in the form of text, image, video, and meme. Among them, memes are currently widely used to disseminate offensive material amongst people. It is primarily in the form of pictures and text. In the present paper, troll memes are identified, which is necessary to create a healthy society. To do so, a hybrid deep learning model combining convolutional neural networks and bidirectional long short term memory is proposed to identify trolled memes. The dataset used in the study is a part of the competition EACL 2021: Troll Meme classification in Tamil. The proposed model obtained 10th rank in the competition and reported a precision of 0.52, recall 0.59, and weighted F10.3.