@inproceedings{lia-etal-2025-read,
    title = "Read Between the Lines: A Benchmark for Uncovering Political Bias in {B}angla News Articles",
    author = "Lia, Nusrat Jahan  and
      Roy Dipta, Shubhashis  and
      Zehady, Abdullah Khan  and
      Islam, Naymul  and
      Chakraborty, Madhusodan  and
      Al Wasif, Abdullah",
    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-1.5/",
    pages = "61--79",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-314-2",
    abstract = "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."
}