H. A. Z. Sameen Shahgir

H. A. Z. Sameen Shahgir, Khondker Salman Sayeed, Tanjeem Azwad Zaman

Speech is inherently continuous, where discrete words, phonemes and other units are not clearly segmented, and so speech recognition has been an active research problem for decades. In this work we have fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 to recognize and transcribe Bengali speech -- training it on the Bengali Common Voice Speech Dataset. After training for 71 epochs, on a training set consisting of 36919 mp3 files, we achieved a training loss of 0.3172 and WER of 0.2524 on a validation set of size 7,747. Using a 5-gram language model, the Levenshtein Distance was 2.6446 on a test set of size 7,747. Then the training set and validation set were combined, shuffled and split into 85-15 ratio. Training for 7 more epochs on this combined dataset yielded an improved Levenshtein Distance of 2.60753 on the test set. Our model was the best performing one, achieving a Levenshtein Distance of 6.234 on a hidden dataset, which was 1.1049 units lower than other competing submissions.

H. A. Z. Sameen Shahgir, Khondker Salman Sayeed

This paper presents a method for detecting grammatical errors in Bangla using a Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) Language Model, using the small variant of BanglaT5, fine-tuned on a corpus of 9385 sentences where errors were bracketed by the dedicated demarcation symbol. The T5 model was primarily designed for translation and is not specifically designed for this task, so extensive post-processing was necessary to adapt it to the task of error detection. Our experiments show that the T5 model can achieve low Levenshtein Distance in detecting grammatical errors in Bangla, but post-processing is essential to achieve optimal performance. The final average Levenshtein Distance after post-processing the output of the fine-tuned model was 1.0394 on a test set of 5000 sentences. This paper also presents a detailed analysis of the errors detected by the model and discusses the challenges of adapting a translation model for grammar. Our approach can be extended to other languages, demonstrating the potential of T5 models for detecting grammatical errors in a wide range of languages.