Online discourse in Bangla is rife with nuanced toxicity expressed through code-mixing, dialectal variation, and euphemism. Effective moderation thus requires fine-grained detection of hate type, target, and severity, rather than a binary label. To address this, we organized the Bangla Hate Speech Identification Shared Task at the BLP 2025 workshop, co-located with IJCNLP-AACL 2025, comprising three subtasks: (1A) hate-type detection, (1B) hate-target detection, and (1C) joint prediction of type, target, and severity in a multi-task setup. The subtasks attracted 161, 103, and 90 participants, with 36, 23, and 20 final submissions, respectively, while a total of 19 teams submitted system description papers. The submitted systems employed a wide range of approaches, ranging from classical machine learning to fine-tuned pretrained models and zero-/few-shot LLMs. We describe the task setup, datasets, and evaluation framework, and summarize participant systems. All datasets and evaluation scripts are publicly released.

Though large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in multilingual contexts, their political and sociocultural biases in low-resource languages remain critically underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how LLM-generated texts in Bengali shift in response to personas with varying political orientations (left vs. right), religious identities (Hindu vs. Muslim), and national affiliations (Bangladeshi vs. Indian). In a quasi-experimental study, we simulate these personas and prompt an LLM to respond to political discussions. Measuring the shifts relative to responses for a baseline Bengali persona, we examined how political orientation influences LLM outputs, how topical association shape the political leanings of outputs, and how demographic persona-induced changes align with differently politically oriented variations. Our findings highlight left-leaning political bias in Bengali text generation and its significant association with Muslim sociocultural and demographic identity. We also connect our findings with broader discussions around emancipatory politics, epistemological considerations, and alignment of multilingual models.

This paper presents a computational approach for creating a dataset on communal violence in the context of Bangladesh and West Bengal of India and benchmark evaluation. In recent years, social media has been used as a weapon by factions of different religions and backgrounds to incite hatred, resulting in physical communal violence and causing death and destruction. To prevent such abusive use of online platforms, we propose a framework for classifying online posts using an adaptive question-based approach. We collected more than 168,000 YouTube comments from a set of manually selected videos known for inciting violence in Bangladesh and West Bengal. Using both unsupervised and later semi-supervised topic modeling methods on those unstructured data, we discovered the major word clusters to interpret the related topics of peace and violence. Topic words were later used to select 20,142 posts related to peace and violence of which we annotated a total of 6,046 posts. Finally, we applied different modeling techniques based on linguistic features, and sentence transformers to benchmark the labeled dataset with the best-performing model reaching ~71% macro F1 score.