Santhosh Kakarla

Gautama Shastry Bulusu Venkata, Santhosh Kakarla, Maheedhar Omtri Mohan et al.

TRUST Agents is a collaborative multi-agent framework for explainable fact verification and fake news detection. Rather than treating verification as a simple true-or-false classification task, the system identifies verifiable claims, retrieves relevant evidence, compares claims against that evidence, reasons under uncertainty, and generates explanations that humans can inspect. The baseline pipeline consists of four specialized agents. A claim extractor uses named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and LLM-based extraction to identify factual claims. A retrieval agent performs hybrid sparse and dense search using BM25 and FAISS. A verifier agent compares claims with retrieved evidence and produces verdicts with calibrated confidence. An explainer agent then generates a human-readable report with explicit evidence citations. To handle complex claims more effectively, we introduce a research-oriented extension with three additional components: a decomposer agent inspired by LoCal-style claim decomposition, a Delphi-inspired multi-agent jury with specialized verifier personas, and a logic aggregator that combines atomic verdicts using conjunction, disjunction, negation, and implication. We evaluate both pipelines on the LIAR benchmark against fine-tuned BERT, fine-tuned RoBERTa, and a zero-shot LLM baseline. Although supervised encoders remain stronger on raw metrics, TRUST Agents improves interpretability, evidence transparency, and reasoning over compound claims. Results also show that retrieval quality and uncertainty calibration remain the main bottlenecks in trustworthy automated fact verification.

Santhosh Kakarla, Gautama Shastry Bulusu Venkata, Aishwarya Gaddam

Multilingual language models have significantly advanced due to rapid progress in natural language processing. Models like BLOOM 1.7B, trained on diverse multilingual datasets, aim to bridge linguistic gaps. However, their effectiveness in capturing linguistic knowledge, particularly for low-resource languages, remains an open question. This study critically examines MLMs capabilities in multilingual understanding, semantic representation, and cross-lingual knowledge transfer. While these models perform well for high-resource languages, they struggle with less-represented ones. Additionally, traditional evaluation methods often overlook their internal syntactic and semantic encoding. This research addresses key limitations through three objectives. First, it assesses semantic similarity by analyzing multilingual word embeddings for consistency using cosine similarity. Second, it examines BLOOM-1.7B and Qwen2 through Named Entity Recognition and sentence similarity tasks to understand their linguistic structures. Third, it explores cross-lingual knowledge transfer by evaluating generalization from high-resource to low-resource languages in sentiment analysis and text classification. By leveraging linguistic probing, performance metrics, and visualizations, this study provides insights into the strengths and limitations of MLMs. The findings aim to enhance multilingual NLP models, ensuring better support for both high- and low-resource languages, thereby promoting inclusivity in language technologies.

Santhosh Kakarla, Gautama Shastry Bulusu Venkata

Hate speech detection in low-resource languages like Telugu is a growing challenge in NLP. This study investigates transformer-based models, including TeluguHateBERT, HateBERT, DeBERTa, Muril, IndicBERT, Roberta, and Hindi-Abusive-MuRIL, for classifying hate speech in Telugu. We fine-tune these models using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to optimize efficiency and performance. Additionally, we explore a multilingual approach by translating Telugu text into English using Google Translate to assess its impact on classification accuracy. Our experiments reveal that most models show improved performance after translation, with DeBERTa and Hindi-Abusive-MuRIL achieving higher accuracy and F1 scores compared to training directly on Telugu text. Notably, Hindi-Abusive-MuRIL outperforms all other models in both the original Telugu dataset and the translated dataset, demonstrating its robustness across different linguistic settings. This suggests that translation enables models to leverage richer linguistic features available in English, leading to improved classification performance. The results indicate that multilingual processing can be an effective approach for hate speech detection in low-resource languages. These findings demonstrate that transformer models, when fine-tuned appropriately, can significantly improve hate speech detection in Telugu, paving the way for more robust multilingual NLP applications.