India

Large models have advanced in processing long input sequences, but their ability to consistently use information across extended contexts remains a challenge. Recent studies highlight a positional bias where models prioritize information at the beginning or end of the input while neglecting the middle, resulting in a U-shaped performance curve but this was limited to English. Whether this bias is universal or shaped by language-specific factors remains unclear. In this work, we investigate positional bias in Bangla, a widely spoken but computationally underrepresented language. To support this, we introduce a novel Bangla benchmark dataset, bnContextQA, specifically designed for long-context comprehension. The dataset comprises of 350 long-context QA instances, each paired with 30 context paragraphs, allowing controlled evaluation of information retrieval at different positions. Using this dataset, we assess the performance of LLMs on Bangla across varying passage positions, providing insights into cross-linguistic positional effects. The bnContextQA dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/labiba02/bnContextQA.git to support future research on long-context understanding in Bangla and multilingual LLMs.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

BLUCK: A Benchmark Dataset for Bengali Linguistic Understanding and Cultural Knowledge

mmlu

low-resourced language

bengali

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

workshop paper

Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. However, their evaluation has been predominantly confined to high-resource languages such as English. In this paper, we introduce a manually translated Bangla multi-step reasoning dataset derived from the English Reveal dataset, featuring both binary and non-binary question types. We conduct a controlled evaluation of English-centric and Bangla-centric multilingual small language models on the original dataset and our translated version to compare their ability to exploit relevant reasoning steps to produce correct answers. Our results show that, in comparable settings, reasoning context is beneficial for more challenging non-binary questions, but models struggle to employ relevant Bangla reasoning steps effectively. We conclude by exploring how reasoning steps contribute to models' predictions, highlighting different trends across models and languages.

bnContextQA: Benchmarking Long-Context Question Answering and Challenges in Bangla

Real-time speech assistants are becoming increasingly popular for ensuring improved accessibility to information. Bengali, being a low-resource language with a high regional dialectal diversity, has seen limited progress in developing such systems. Existing systems are not optimized for real-time use and focus only on standard Bengali. In this work, we present BanglaTalk, the first real-time speech assistance system for Bengali regional dialects. BanglaTalk follows the client-server architecture and uses the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) to ensure low-latency communication. To address dialectal variation, we introduce a dialect-aware ASR system, BRDialect, developed by fine-tuning the IndicWav2Vec model in ten Bengali regional dialects. It outperforms the baseline ASR models by 12.41-33.98% on the RegSpeech12 dataset. Furthermore, BanglaTalk can operate at a low bandwidth of 24 kbps while maintaining an average end-to-end delay of 4.9 seconds. Low bandwidth usage and minimal end-to-end delay make the system both cost-effective and interactive for real-time use cases, enabling inclusive and accessible speech technology for the diverse community of Bengali speakers.

Reveal-Bangla: A Dataset for Cross-Lingual Multi-Step Reasoning Evaluation

Detecting media bias is crucial, specifically in the South Asian region. Despite this, annotated datasets and computational studies for Bangla political bias research remain scarce. Crucially because, political stance detection in Bangla news requires understanding of linguistic cues, cultural context, subtle biases, rhetorical strategies, code-switching, implicit sentiment, and socio-political background. To address this, we introduce the first benchmark dataset of 200 politically significant and highly debated Bangla news articles, labeled for government-leaning, government-critique, and neutral stances, alongside diagnostic analyses for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Our comprehensive evaluation of 28 proprietary and open-source LLMs shows strong performance in detecting government-critique content (F1 up to 0.83) but substantial difficulty with neutral articles (F1 as low as 0.00). Models also tend to over-predict government-leaning stances, often misinterpreting ambiguous narratives. This dataset and its associated diagnostics provide a foundation for advancing stance detection in Bangla media research and offer insights for improving LLM performance in low-resource languages.

BanglaTalk: Towards Real-Time Speech Assistance for Bengali Regional Dialects

While machine translation has made significant strides for high-resource languages, many regional languages and their dialects, such as the Bangla variants Chittagong and Sylhet, remain underserved. Existing resources are often insufficient for robust sentence-level evaluation and overlook the widespread real-world practice of romanization, the common practice of typing native languages using the Latin script in digital communication. To address these gaps, we introduce BhasaBodh, a comprehensive benchmark for Bangla dialectal machine translation. We construct and release a sentence-level parallel dataset for Chittagong and Sylhet dialects aligned with Standard Bangla and English, create a novel romanized version of the dialectal data to facilitate evaluation in realistic multi-script scenarios, and provide the first comprehensive performance baselines by fine-tuning two powerful multilingual models, NLLB-200 and mBART-50, on seven distinct translation tasks. Our experiments reveal that mBART-50 consistently outperforms NLLB-200 on most dialectal and romanized tasks, achieving a BLEU score as high as 87.44 on the Romanized-to-Standard Bangla normalization task. However, complex cross-lingual and cross-script translation remains a significant challenge. BhasaBodh lays the groundwork for future research in low-resource dialectal NLP, offering a valuable resource for developing more inclusive and practical translation systems.

Read Between the Lines: A Benchmark for Uncovering Political Bias in Bangla News Articles

Online safety in low-resource languages relies on effective hate speech detection, yet Bangla remains critically underexplored. Existing resources focus narrowly on binary classification and fail to capture the evolving, implicit nature of online hate. To address this, we introduce BanHate, a large-scale Bangla hate speech dataset, comprising 19,203 YouTube comments collected between April 2024 and June 2025. Each comment is annotated for binary hate labels, seven fine-grained categories, and seven target groups, reflecting diverse forms of abuse in contemporary Bangla discourse. We develop a tailored pipeline for data collection, filtering, and annotation with majority voting to ensure reliability. To benchmark BanHate, we evaluate a diverse set of open- and closed-source large language models under prompting and LoRA fine-tuning. We find that LoRA substantially improves open-source models, while closed-source models, such as GPT-4o and Gemini, achieve strong performance in binary hate classification, but face challenges in detecting implicit and fine-grained hate. BanHate sets a new benchmark for Bangla hate speech research, providing a foundation for safer moderation in low-resource languages. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/aplycaebous/BanHate.

CheckSent-BN: A Bengali Multi-Task Dataset for Claim Checkworthiness and Sentiment Classification from News Headlines

The task of Bengali text optimization demands not only the generation of concise and coherent summaries but also grammatical accuracy, semantic appropriateness, and factual reliability. This study presents a dual-phase optimization framework for Bengali text summarization that integrates entity-preserving preprocessing and abstractive generation with mT5, followed by refinement through sentence ranking, entity consistency enforcement, and optimization with instruction-tuned LLMs such as mBART. Evaluations using ROUGE, BLEU,BERTScore, and human ratings of fluency, adequacy, coherence, and readability show consistent gains over baseline summarizers. By embedding grammatical and factual safe guards into the summarization pipeline, this study establishes a robust and scalable benchmark for Bengali NLP, advancing text optimization research. Our model achieves 0.54 ROUGE-1 and 0.88 BERTScore on BANSData, outperforming recent multilingual baselines.

BanHate: An Up-to-Date and Fine-Grained Bangla Hate Speech Dataset

We present a novel Bangla Dialect Dataset comprising 600 annotated instances across four major dialects: Chattogram, Barishal, Sylhet, and Noakhali. The dataset was constructed from YouTube comments spanning diverse domains to capture authentic dialectal variations in informal online communication. Each instance includes the original dialectical text, its standard Bangla translation, and sentiment labels (Positive and Negative). We benchmark several state-of-the-art large language models on dialect-to-standard translation and sentiment analysis tasks using zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies. Our experiments reveal that transliteration significantly improves translation quality for closed-source models, with GPT-4o-mini achieving the highest BLEU score of 0.343 in zero-shot with transliteration. For sentiment analysis, GPT-4o-mini demonstrates perfect precision, recall, and F1 scores (1.000) in few-shot settings. This dataset addresses the critical gap in resources for low-resource Bangla dialects and provides a foundation for developing dialect-aware NLP systems.

A Comprehensive Text Optimization Approach to Bangla Summarization

Automatic image captioning has gained significant attention at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, yet research in low-resource languages such as Bangla remains limited. This work introduces BiCap, an attention-based encoder–decoder framework designed for Bangla image captioning. The model leverages a pretrained ResNet-50 as the encoder to extract rich visual features and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network as the decoder to sequentially generate Bangla captions. To overcome the fixed-length bottleneck of traditional encoder–decoder architectures, we integrate Bahdanau attention, enabling the decoder to dynamically focus on salient image regions while producing each word. The model is trained and evaluated on the Chitron dataset, with extensive preprocessing including vocabulary construction, tokenization, and word embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that BiCap achieves superior performance over the existing works (Masud et al., 2025; Hossain et al., 2024; Das et al., 2023; Humaira et al., 2021), yielding higher BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, CIDEr scores. Improved fluency in human evaluation further confirms that the model generates more contextually accurate and semantically coherent captions, although occasional challenges remain with complex scenes. Recent advances in Vision–Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, BLIP, Flamingo, LLaVA, and MiniGPT-4, have redefined state-of-the-art captioning performance in high-resource settings. However, these models require large multimodal corpora and extensive pretraining that are currently unavailable for Bangla. BiCap therefore offers a resource-efficient, interpretable, and practically deployable solution tailored to low-resource multimodal learning.

Benchmarking Large Language Models on Bangla Dialect Translation and Dialectal Sentiment Analysis

We study sentence-level generative data augmentation for Bangla semantic classification across four public datasets and three pretrained model families (BanglaBERT, XLM-Indic, mBERT). We evaluate two widely used, reproducible techniques—paraphrasing (mT5-based) and round-trip backtranslation (Bn–En–Bn)—and analyze their impact under realistic class imbalance. Overall, augmentation often helps, but gains are tightly coupled to label quality: paraphrasing typically outperforms backtranslation and yields the most consistent improvements for the monolingual model, whereas multilingual encoders benefit less and can be more sensitive to noisy minority-class expansions. A key empirical observation is that the neutral class appears to be a major source of annotation noise, which degrades decision boundaries and can cap the benefits of augmentation even when positive/negative classes are clean and polarized. We provide practical guidance for Bangla sentiment pipelines: (i) use simple sentence-level augmentation to rebalance classes when labels are reliable; (ii) allocate additional curation and higher inter-annotator agreement targets to the neutral class. Our results indicate when augmentation helps and suggest that data quality—not model choice alone—can become the limiting factor.

A Comparative Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Techniques for Bengali Standard-to-Dialect Machine Translation Using LLMs

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) identifies sentiments toward specific aspects of an entity. While progress has been substantial for high-resource languages such as English, low-resource languages like Bangla remain underexplored due to limited annotated data and linguistic challenges. We propose Gen-mABSA-T5, a multilingual zero-shot generative framework for ABSA based on Flan-T5, incorporating prompt engineering and Natural Language Inference (NLI). Without task-specific training, Gen-mABSA-T5 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy of 61.56% on the large Bangla corpus, 73.50% on SemEval Laptop, and 73.56% on SemEval Restaurant outperforming both English and Bangla task-specific models in zero-shot settings. It delivers reasonable performance against very large general-purpose models on both English and Bangla benchmarks. These results highlight the effectiveness of generative, zero-shot approaches for ABSA in low-resource and multilingual settings.

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