LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target

Md Arid Hasan, Firoj Alam, Md Fahad Hossain, Usman Naseem, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed


Abstract
Online social media platforms have become central to communication and information exchange, however, they also serve as fertile ground for hate speech, offensive language, and bullying targeting individuals and communities. Such content undermines online safety and inclusion, underscoring the need for reliable detection systems—especially in low-resource languages with limited moderation tools. For Bangla, existing work provides valuable resources and models, however, they are mostly single-task (e.g., binary hate/offense) with narrow coverage of key dimensions such as type, severity, and target. We address these gaps by introducing *the first multi-task* Bangla hate-speech dataset, *BanglaMultiHate*, one of the largest manually annotated dataset to date. Using this resource, we performed a comparative study across different baselines, monolingual pretrained models, and LLMs under zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning settings. Our findings show that while LoRA-tuned LLMs rival BanglaBERT, culturally grounded pretraining remains crucial for robust performance. Overall, *BanglaMultiHate* establishes a stronger benchmark for hate speech detection in low-resource contexts. All data and scripts are released for reproducibility.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1565
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
33962–33980
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1565/
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Cite (ACL):
Md Arid Hasan, Firoj Alam, Md Fahad Hossain, Usman Naseem, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. 2026. LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 33962–33980, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target (Hasan et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1565.pdf
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