HateNet-BN at BLP-2025 Task 1: A Hierarchical Attention Approach for Bangla Hate Speech Detection

Mohaymen Ul Anam, Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder, Ashraful Islam, Akmmahbubur Rahman, M Ashraful Amin


Abstract
The rise of social media in Bangladesh has increased abusive and hateful content, which is difficult to detect due to the informal nature of Bangla and limited resources. The BLP 2025 shared task addressed this challenge with Subtask 1A (multi-label abuse categories) and Subtask 1B (target identification). We propose a parameter-efficient model using a frozen BanglaBERT backbone with hierarchical attention to capture token level importance across hidden layers. Context vectors are aggregated for classification, combining syntactic and semantic features. On Subtask 1A, our frozen model achieved a micro-F1 of 0.7178, surpassing the baseline of 0.7100, while the unfrozen variant scored 0.7149. Our submissions ranked 15th (Subtask 1A) and 12th (Subtask 1B), showing that layer-wise attention with a frozen backbone can effectively detect abusive Bangla text.
Anthology ID:
2025.banglalp-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2025)
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Firoj Alam, Sudipta Kar, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Naeemul Hassan, Enamul Hoque Prince, Mohiuddin Tasnim, Md Rashad Al Hasan Rony, Md Tahmid Rahman Rahman
Venues:
BanglaLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
544–550
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.banglalp-1.51/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohaymen Ul Anam, Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder, Ashraful Islam, Akmmahbubur Rahman, and M Ashraful Amin. 2025. HateNet-BN at BLP-2025 Task 1: A Hierarchical Attention Approach for Bangla Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP-2025), pages 544–550, Mumbai, India. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HateNet-BN at BLP-2025 Task 1: A Hierarchical Attention Approach for Bangla Hate Speech Detection (Anam et al., BanglaLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.banglalp-1.51.pdf