BanglaNirTox: A Large-scale Parallel Corpus for Explainable AI in Bengali Text Detoxification

Abstract: Toxic language in Bengali remains prevalent, especially in online environments, with few effective precautions against it. Although text detoxification has seen progress in high-resource languages, Bengali remains underexplored due to limited resources. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline for Bengali text detoxification that combines Pareto class-optimized LLMs and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to generate detoxified sentences. To support this effort, we construct BanglaNirTox, an artificially generated parallel corpus of 68,041 toxic Bengali sentences with class-wise toxicity labels, reasonings, and detoxified paraphrases, using Pareto-optimized LLMs evaluated on random samples. The resulting BanglaNirTox dataset is used to fine-tune LLMs to produce better detoxified versions of Bengali sentences. Our findings show that Pareto-optimized LLMs with CoT prompting significantly enhance the quality and consistency of Bengali text detoxification.