@inproceedings{ahmad-etal-2025-bncontextqa,
    title = "bn{C}ontext{QA}: Benchmarking Long-Context Question Answering and Challenges in {B}angla",
    author = "Ahmad, Adnan  and
      Adiba, Labiba  and
      Rasul, Namirah  and
      Laskar, Md Tahmid Rahman  and
      Ahmed, Sabbir",
    editor = "Alam, Firoj  and
      Kar, Sudipta  and
      Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and
      Hassan, Naeemul  and
      Prince, Enamul Hoque  and
      Tasnim, Mohiuddin  and
      Rony, Md Rashad Al Hasan  and
      Rahman, Md Tahmid Rahman",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2025)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.banglalp-1.29/",
    pages = "357--365",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-314-2",
    abstract = "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."
}