Shahriar Manzoor

Bidyarthi Paul, Faika Fairuj Preotee, Shuvashis Sarker et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) in regional dialects is a critical yet underexplored area in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for low-resource languages like Bangla. While NER systems for Standard Bangla have made progress, no existing resources or models specifically address the challenge of regional dialects such as Barishal, Chittagong, Mymensingh, Noakhali, and Sylhet, which exhibit unique linguistic features that existing models fail to handle effectively. To fill this gap, we introduce ANCHOLIK-NER, the first benchmark dataset for NER in Bangla regional dialects, comprising 17,405 sentences distributed across five regions. The dataset was sourced from publicly available resources and supplemented with manual translations, ensuring alignment of named entities across dialects. We evaluate three transformer-based models - Bangla BERT, Bangla BERT Base, and BERT Base Multilingual Cased - on this dataset. Our findings demonstrate that BERT Base Multilingual Cased performs best in recognizing named entities across regions, with significant performance observed in Mymensingh with an F1-score of 82.611%. Despite strong overall performance, challenges remain in region like Chittagong, where the models show lower precision and recall. Since no previous NER systems for Bangla regional dialects exist, our work represents a foundational step in addressing this gap. Future work will focus on improving model performance in underperforming regions and expanding the dataset to include more dialects, enhancing the development of dialect-aware NER systems.

Azizul Hakim Fayaz, MD. Shorif Uddin, Rayhan Uddin Bhuiyan et al.

Hate speech on digital platforms has become a growing concern globally, especially in linguistically diverse countries like Bangladesh, where regional dialects play a major role in everyday communication. Despite progress in hate speech detection for standard Bangla, Existing datasets and systems fail to address the informal and culturally rich expressions found in dialects such as Barishal, Noakhali, and Chittagong. This oversight results in limited detection capability and biased moderation, leaving large sections of harmful content unaccounted for. To address this gap, this study introduces BIDWESH, the first multi-dialectal Bangla hate speech dataset, constructed by translating and annotating 9,183 instances from the BD-SHS corpus into three major regional dialects. Each entry was manually verified and labeled for hate presence, type (slander, gender, religion, call to violence), and target group (individual, male, female, group), ensuring linguistic and contextual accuracy. The resulting dataset provides a linguistically rich, balanced, and inclusive resource for advancing hate speech detection in Bangla. BIDWESH lays the groundwork for the development of dialect-sensitive NLP tools and contributes significantly to equitable and context-aware content moderation in low-resource language settings.