Mohammad Shafiul Alam

G. M. Shahariar, Md. Tanvir Rouf Shawon, Faisal Muhammad Shah et al.

The proliferation of fake reviews on various online platforms has created a major concern for both consumers and businesses. Such reviews can deceive customers and cause damage to the reputation of products or services, making it crucial to identify them. Although the detection of fake reviews has been extensively studied in English language, detecting fake reviews in non-English languages such as Bengali is still a relatively unexplored research area. This paper introduces the Bengali Fake Review Detection (BFRD) dataset, the first publicly available dataset for identifying fake reviews in Bengali. The dataset consists of 7710 non-fake and 1339 fake food-related reviews collected from social media posts. To convert non-Bengali words in a review, a unique pipeline has been proposed that translates English words to their corresponding Bengali meaning and also back transliterates Romanized Bengali to Bengali. We have conducted rigorous experimentation using multiple deep learning and pre-trained transformer language models to develop a reliable detection system. Finally, we propose a weighted ensemble model that combines four pre-trained transformers: BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT Base, BanglaBERT Large, and BanglaBERT Generator . According to the experiment results, the proposed ensemble model obtained a weighted F1-score of 0.9843 on 13390 reviews, including 1339 actual fake reviews and 5356 augmented fake reviews generated with the nlpaug library. The remaining 6695 reviews were randomly selected from the 7710 non-fake instances. The model achieved a 0.9558 weighted F1-score when the fake reviews were augmented using the bnaug library.

Faisal Tareque Shohan, Abu Ubaida Akash, Muhammad Ibrahim et al.

Crime is an unlawful act that carries legal repercussions. Bangladesh has a high crime rate due to poverty, population growth, and many other socio-economic issues. For law enforcement agencies, understanding crime patterns is essential for preventing future criminal activity. For this purpose, these agencies need structured crime database. This paper introduces a novel crime dataset that contains temporal, geographic, weather, and demographic data about 6574 crime incidents of Bangladesh. We manually gather crime news articles of a seven year time span from a daily newspaper archive. We extract basic features from these raw text. Using these basic features, we then consult standard service-providers of geo-location and weather data in order to garner these information related to the collected crime incidents. Furthermore, we collect demographic information from Bangladesh National Census data. All these information are combined that results in a standard machine learning dataset. Together, 36 features are engineered for the crime prediction task. Five supervised machine learning classification algorithms are then evaluated on this newly built dataset and satisfactory results are achieved. We also conduct exploratory analysis on various aspects the dataset. This dataset is expected to serve as the foundation for crime incidence prediction systems for Bangladesh and other countries. The findings of this study will help law enforcement agencies to forecast and contain crime as well as to ensure optimal resource allocation for crime patrol and prevention.

Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Rabeya Islam Mumu et al.

Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and categorizing people's emotions or opinions regarding various topics. Analyzing political sentiment is critical for understanding the complexities of public opinion processes, especially during election seasons. It gives significant information on voter preferences, attitudes, and current trends. In this study, we investigate political sentiment analysis during Bangladeshi elections, specifically examining how effectively Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) capture complex sentiment characteristics. Our study centers on the creation of the "Motamot" dataset, comprising 7,058 instances annotated with positive and negative sentiments, sourced from diverse online newspaper portals, forming a comprehensive resource for political sentiment analysis. We meticulously evaluate the performance of various PLMs including BanglaBERT, Bangla BERT Base, XLM-RoBERTa, mBERT, and sahajBERT, alongside LLMs such as Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT 3.5 Turbo. Moreover, we explore zero-shot and few-shot learning strategies to enhance our understanding of political sentiment analysis methodologies. Our findings underscore BanglaBERT's commendable accuracy of 88.10% among PLMs. However, the exploration into LLMs reveals even more promising results. Through the adept application of Few-Shot learning techniques, Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves an impressive accuracy of 96.33%, surpassing the remarkable performance of GPT 3.5 Turbo, which stands at 94%. This underscores Gemini 1.5 Pro's status as the superior performer in this comparison.