# Read Between the Lines: A Benchmark for Uncovering Political Bias in Bangla News Articles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [OpenMathInstruct-1: A 1.8 Million Math Instruction Tuning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10176/) (2024)
- [BanglaBERT: Language Model Pretraining and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Language Understanding Evaluation in Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00204/) (2021)
- [We Can Detect Your Bias: Predicting the Political Ideology of News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05338/) (2020)
- [In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02670/) (2019)
- [Stance Detection: A Practical Guide to Classifying Political Beliefs in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01723/) (2023)
- [To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05325/) (2021)
- [BanTH: A Multi-label Hate Speech Detection Dataset for Transliterated Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13281/) (2024)
- [Identification of Biased Terms in News Articles by Comparison of Outlet-specific Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07384/) (2021)
- [Examining the Influence of Political Bias on Large Language Model Performance in Stance Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17688/) (2024)
- [Analyzing Political Bias in LLMs via Target-Oriented Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19776/) (2025)
- [Connecting the Dots in News Analysis: Bridging the Cross-Disciplinary Disparities in Media Bias and Framing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08069/) (2023)
- [Cross-Target Stance Detection: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13594/) (2024)
- [Retain or Reframe? A Computational Framework for the Analysis of Framing in News Articles and Reader Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04612/) (2025)
- [InstaTrans: An Instruction-Aware Translation Framework for Non-English Instruction Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01512/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21165/) (2026)
- [EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18668/) (2026)
- [Register Shifts Break LLM Safety: A Bengali Benchmark with Culturally Grounded Harms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22335/) (2026)
- [OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06490/) (2026)
- [New Evidence, Same Choice: Testing Physical Experiment Selection in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11022/) (2026)
- [Ideological Stance Detection in a Low-Resource Language: Polarization in Bangladeshi Public vs Private University Discourse on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04401/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.