BiST: A Gold Standard Bangla-English Bilingual Corpus for Sentence Structure and Tense Classification with Inter-Annotator Agreement
Proceedings of the SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL "Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages
Abstract
High-quality bilingual resources remain a critical bottleneck for advancing multilingual NLP in low-resource settings, particularly for Bangla. To mitigate this gap, we introduce BiST, a rigorously curated Bangla–English corpus for sentence-level grammatical classification, annotated across two fundamental dimensions: syntactic structure (Simple, Complex, Compound, Complex-Compound) and tense (Present, Past, Future). The corpus is compiled from open-licensed encyclopedic sources and naturally composed conversational text, followed by systematic preprocessing and automated language identification, resulting in 30,534 sentences, including 17,465 English and 13,069 Bangla instances. Annotation quality is ensured through a multi-stage framework with three independent annotators and dimension-wise Fleiss’ Kappa (κ) agreement, yielding reliable and reproducible labels with κ values of 0.82 and 0.88 for structural and temporal annotation, respectively. Statistical analyses demonstrate realistic structural and temporal distributions, while baseline evaluations show that dual-encoder architectures leveraging complementary language-specific representations consistently outperform strong multilingual encoders. Beyond benchmarking, BiST provides explicit linguistic supervision that supports grammatical modeling tasks, including controlled text generation, automated feedback generation, and cross-lingual representation learning. The corpus establishes a unified resource for bilingual grammatical modeling and facilitates linguistically grounded multilingual research.