Dhoroni: Exploring Bengali Climate Change and Environmental Views with a Multi-Perspective News Dataset and Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Climate change poses critical challenges globally, disproportionately affecting low-income countries that often lack resources and linguistic representation on the international stage. Despite Bangladesh's status as one of the most vulnerable nations to climate impacts, research gaps persist in Bengali-language studies related to climate change and NLP. To address this disparity, we introduce Dhoroni, a novel Bengali (Bangla) climate change and environmental news dataset, comprising a 2300 annotated Bangla news articles, offering multiple perspectives such as political influence, scientific/statistical data, authenticity, stance detection, and stakeholder involvement. Furthermore, we present an in-depth exploratory analysis of Dhoroni and introduce BanglaBERT-Dhoroni family, a novel baseline model family for climate and environmental opinion detection in Bangla, fine-tuned on our dataset. This research contributes significantly to enhancing accessibility and analysis of climate discourse in Bengali (Bangla), addressing crucial communication and research gaps in climate-impacted regions like Bangladesh with 180 million people.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: Multiple perspectives annotated and discussed in Dhoroni dataset.
• Figure 2: Keyword used for data collection in Dhoroni dataset.
• Figure 3: Overview of Data Collection Methodology.
• Figure 4: Word cloud of news titles.
• Figure 5: Number of News Articles Collected from Each Quarter.