Daily Papers

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.

This paper addresses the challenges translating case law under Hong Kong's bilingual legal system. It highlights the initial success of translating all written statutes into Chinese before the 1997 handover, a task mandated by the Basic Law. The effort involved significant collaboration among legal, linguistic, and translation experts, resulting in a comprehensive and culturally appropriate bilingual legal system. However, translating case law remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume and continuous growth of judicial decisions. The paper critiques the governments and judiciarys sporadic and uncoordinated efforts to translate case law, contrasting it with the thorough approach previously taken for statute translation. Although the government acknowledges the importance of legal bilingualism, it lacks a sustainable strategy for translating case law. The Judiciarys position that translating all judgments is unnecessary, unrealistic, and not cost-effectiveis analyzed and critiqued for its impact on legal transparency and public trust. A proposed solution involves leveraging machine translation technology through a human-machine interactive translation platform, which undergoes two major transitions. Initially based on a neural model, the platform transitions to using a large language model for improved translation accuracy. Furthermore, it evolves from a single-agent system to a multi-agent system, incorporating Translator, Annotator, and Proofreader agents. This multi-agent approach, supported by a grant, aims to facilitate efficient, high-quality translation of judicial judgments by integrating advanced artificial intelligence and continuous feedback mechanisms, thus better meeting the needs of a bilingual legal system.