BenCoDiC: A Large-Scale Contextual Cyberbullying Corpus for Bengali Political News Discourse FULL VERSION

Clickbait, where video titles and thumbnails exaggerate or misrepresent content, reduces user trust, wastes attention, and promotes misinformation on video-sharing platforms. Detecting Bengali clickbait remains challenging because publicly available multimodal datasets are limited. To address this gap, we introduce BanClickThumb, a curated dataset of 7,147 Bengali YouTube thumbnail-title pairs from five content domains, annotated by ten annotators with high agreement (Cohen's Kappa: 0.83-0.93). Using this dataset, we benchmark text-only, image-only, and multimodal approaches. Among unimodal models, BanClickTextFormer (XLM-RoBERTa) achieves 0.82 accuracy, while BanClickImageFormer (SwiftFormer) reaches 0.68. Our proposed multimodal model, BanClickFusionFormer, combines ViT and XLM-RoBERTa through intermediate fusion and achieves the best accuracy of 0.84. Error analysis shows that dense thumbnail text, figurative language, and culturally specific slang remain challenging. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of multimodal fusion for Bengali clickbait detection and provide a publicly available benchmark to support future research on low-resource multimodal content analysis.

Cyberbullying has become a serious and growing concern in todays virtual world. When left unnoticed, it can have adverse consequences for social and mental health. Researchers have explored various types of cyberbullying, but most approaches use single-label classification, assuming that each comment contains only one type of abuse. In reality, a single comment may include overlapping forms such as threats, hate speech, and harassment. Therefore, multilabel detection is both realistic and essential. However, multilabel cyberbullying detection has received limited attention, especially in low-resource languages like Bangla, where robust pre-trained models are scarce. Developing a generalized model with moderate accuracy remains challenging. Transformers offer strong contextual understanding but may miss sequential dependencies, while LSTM models capture temporal flow but lack semantic depth. To address these limitations, we propose a fusion architecture that combines BanglaBERT-Large with a two-layer stacked LSTM. We analyze their behavior to jointly model context and sequence. The model is fine-tuned and evaluated on a publicly available multilabel Bangla cyberbullying dataset covering cyberbully, sexual harassment, threat, and spam. We apply different sampling strategies to address class imbalance. Evaluation uses multiple metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Hamming loss, Cohens kappa, and AUC-ROC. We employ 5-fold cross-validation to assess the generalization of the architecture.

Gender based hate speech research in Bengali has focused almost exclusively on misogyny, leaving anti male hate, or misandry, entirely unstudied for this language and creating a systematic blind spot in moderation systems trained to catch attacks on women but not on men. We introduce Ben-Misandry, the first Bengali misandry detection dataset: 5,000 comments across six taxonomy classes, including a novel category for mocking male emotional vulnerability with no direct analogue in existing misogyny taxonomies. The corpus is taxonomy-controlled synthetic data generated with GPT-4.1, spot-checked by four human reviewers on a 500-comment sample who confirmed the large majority of assigned labels; a full inter-annotator- agreement study is left to future work. We benchmark it with a classical pipeline (seven classifiers over four text representations) and a transformer pipeline (BanglaBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and two fusion strategies). The best classical model, a linear SVM over character-level TF-IDF, reaches 91.8% accuracy; a late fusion ensemble averaging BanglaBERT and XLM-RoBERTa softmax outputs reaches 96.6% accuracy and macro ROC-AUC above 99%, nominally ahead of every single model and early fusion, though we have not run significance testing to confirm these margins are meaningful. We relate this to classifier combination theory, under which averaging encoders with decorrelated errors is expected to reduce variance, and corroborate the decision boundary with Shapley explanations that recover the same class- discriminative vocabulary found in our exploratory analysis, while noting this cannot rule out the model partly keying on synthetic-generation artifacts. Our results indicate misandry detection in Bengali is feasible and measurable on this synthetic corpus, offered as an initial public resource pending validation on real-world data.