Benchmarking Bangla Causality: A Dataset of Implicit and Explicit Causal Sentences and Cause-Effect Relations

ACL ARR 2025 July Submission584 Authors

Abstract: Causal reasoning is central to language understanding, yet remains under-resourced in Bangla. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale dataset for causal inference in Bangla, consisting of over 11663 sentences annotated for causal sentence types (explicit, implicit, non-causal) and token-level spans for causes, effects, and connectives. The dataset captures both simple and complex causal structures across diverse domains such as news, education, and health. We further benchmark a suite of state-of-the-art instruction-tuned large language models, including LLaMA 3.3 70B, Gemma 2 9B, Qwen 32B, and DeepSeek, under zero-shot and three-shot prompting conditions. Our analysis reveals that while LLMs demonstrate moderate success in explicit causality detection, their performance drops significantly on implicit and span-level extraction tasks. This work establishes a foundational resource for Bangla causal understanding and highlights key challenges in adapting multilingual LLMs for structured reasoning in low-resource languages.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Research Area Keywords: Bangla Causality, Cause-Effect relation, Dataset

Contribution Types: Data resources

Languages Studied: Bangla

Submission Number: 584