Overview of BLP-2025 Task 1: Bangla Hate Speech Identification

AbstractOnline 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.