Md Najib Hasan


2025

Bangla, a language spoken by over 300 million native speakers and ranked as the sixth most spoken language worldwide, presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to its complex morphological characteristics and limited resources. Although recent large-decoder-based LLMs, such as GPT, LLaMA, and DeepSeek, have demonstrated excellent performance across many NLP tasks, their effectiveness in Bangla remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we establish the first benchmark comparing large decoder-based LLMs with classic encoder-based models for the Zero-Shot Multi-Label Classification (Zero-Shot-MLC) task in Bangla. Our evaluation of 32 state-of-the-art models reveals that existing so-called powerful encoders and decoders still struggle to achieve high accuracy on the Bangla Zero-Shot-MLC task, suggesting a need for more research and resources for Bangla NLP.