Marathi, the third most widely spoken language in India with over 83 million native speakers, remains significantly underrepresented in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. While sentiment analysis has achieved substantial progress in high-resource languages such as English, Chinese, and Hindi, available Marathi datasets are limited to coarse sentiment labels and lack fine-grained emotional categorization or interpretability through explanations. To address this gap, we present a new annotated dataset of 10,762 Marathi sentences, each labeled with sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral), emotion (joy, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, or neutral), and a corresponding natural language justification. Justifications are written in English and generated using GPT-4 under a human-in-the-loop framework to ensure label fidelity and contextual alignment. Extensive experiments with both classical and transformer-based models demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset for interpretable affective computing in a low-resource language setting, offering a benchmark for future research in multilingual and explainable NLP.

The proliferation of fake news on social media has intensified the spread of misinformation, promoting societal biases, hate, and violence. While recent advancements in Generative AI (GenAI), particularly large language models (LLMs), have shown promise, these models often need more structured representation for accurate verification, as they rely on pre-trained data patterns without access to real-time or validated information. This study presents a framework that utilizes Open Information Extractor 6 (OpenIE6) to extract triplet relationships (subject-predicate-object) from statements and justifications to compute the cosine similarity between the Knowledge Graphs (KGs) of the statements and their supporting justification to precisely measure the relevance and alignment between them. This similarity feature is integrated with an attention mechanism over GenAI-generated embeddings to enhance the model’s ability to capture semantic features accurately. In addition, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier is employed to integrate all features, resulting in a 4% improvement in accuracy and a 5% increase in F1-score over state-of-the-art LLM-based approaches.