Masum Hasan

Wasifur Rahman, Masum Hasan, Md Saiful Islam et al.

In this paper, we investigated whether we can 1) detect participants with ataxia-specific gait characteristics (risk-prediction), and 2) assess severity of ataxia from gait (severity-assessment) using computer vision. We created a dataset of 155 videos from 89 participants, 24 controls and 65 diagnosed with (or are pre-manifest) spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs), performing the gait task of the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) from 11 medical sites located in 8 different states across the United States. We develop a computer vision pipeline to detect, track, and separate out the participants from their surroundings and construct several features from their body pose coordinates to capture gait characteristics like step width, step length, swing, stability, speed, etc. Our risk-prediction model achieves 83.06% accuracy and an 80.23% F1 score. Similarly, our severity-assessment model achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) score of 0.6225 and a Pearson's correlation coefficient score of 0.7268. Our models still performed competitively when evaluated on data from sites not used during training. Furthermore, through feature importance analysis, we found that our models associate wider steps, decreased walking speed, and increased instability with greater ataxia severity, which is consistent with previously established clinical knowledge. Our models create possibilities for remote ataxia assessment in non-clinical settings in the future, which could significantly improve accessibility of ataxia care. Furthermore, our underlying dataset was assembled from a geographically diverse cohort, highlighting its potential to further increase equity. The code used in this study is open to the public, and the anonymized body pose landmark dataset is also available upon request.

Rishov Paul, Md. Mohib Hossain, Mohammed Latif Siddiq et al.

Sequence-to-sequence models have been used to transform erroneous programs into correct ones when trained with a large enough dataset. Some recent studies also demonstrated strong empirical evidence that code review could improve the program repair further. Large language models, trained with Natural Language (NL) and Programming Language (PL), can contain inherent knowledge of both. In this study, we investigate if this inherent knowledge of PL and NL can be utilized to improve automated program repair. We applied PLBART and CodeT5, two state-of-the-art language models that are pre-trained with both PL and NL, on two such natural language-based program repair datasets and found that the pre-trained language models fine-tuned with datasets containing both code review and subsequent code changes notably outperformed each of the previous models. With the advent of code generative models like Codex and GPT-3.5-Turbo, we also performed zero-shot and few-shots learning-based prompt engineering to assess their performance on these datasets. However, the practical application of using LLMs in the context of automated program repair is still a long way off based on our manual analysis of the generated repaired codes by the learning models.

Masum Hasan, Cengiz Ozel, Sammy Potter et al.

In this demo paper, we introduce SAPIEN, a platform for high-fidelity virtual agents driven by large language models that can hold open domain conversations with users in 13 different languages, and display emotions through facial expressions and voice. The platform allows users to customize their virtual agent's personality, background, and conversation premise, thus providing a rich, immersive interaction experience. Furthermore, after the virtual meeting, the user can choose to get the conversation analyzed and receive actionable feedback on their communication skills. This paper illustrates an overview of the platform and discusses the various application domains of this technology, ranging from entertainment to mental health, communication training, language learning, education, healthcare, and beyond. Additionally, we consider the ethical implications of such realistic virtual agent representations and the potential challenges in ensuring responsible use.

Aunabil Chakma, Masum Hasan

This paper describes the system of the LowResource Team for Task 2 of BLP-2023, which involves conducting sentiment analysis on a dataset composed of public posts and comments from diverse social media platforms. Our primary aim is to utilize BanglaBert, a BERT model pre-trained on a large Bangla corpus, using various strategies including fine-tuning, dropping random tokens, and using several external datasets. Our final model is an ensemble of the three best BanglaBert variations. Our system has achieved overall 3rd in the Test Set among 30 participating teams with a score of 0.718. Additionally, we discuss the promising systems that didn't perform well namely task-adaptive pertaining and paraphrasing using BanglaT5. Training codes and external datasets which are used for our system are publicly available at https://github.com/Aunabil4602/bnlp-workshop-task2-2023

Masum Hasan, Tanveer Muttaqueen, Abdullah Al Ishtiaq et al.

Translation between natural language and source code can help software development by enabling developers to comprehend, ideate, search, and write computer programs in natural language. Despite growing interest from the industry and the research community, this task is often difficult due to the lack of large standard datasets suitable for training deep neural models, standard noise removal methods, and evaluation benchmarks. This leaves researchers to collect new small-scale datasets, resulting in inconsistencies across published works. In this study, we present CoDesc -- a large parallel dataset composed of 4.2 million Java methods and natural language descriptions. With extensive analysis, we identify and remove prevailing noise patterns from the dataset. We demonstrate the proficiency of CoDesc in two complementary tasks for code-description pairs: code summarization and code search. We show that the dataset helps improve code search by up to 22\% and achieves the new state-of-the-art in code summarization. Furthermore, we show CoDesc's effectiveness in pre-training--fine-tuning setup, opening possibilities in building pretrained language models for Java. To facilitate future research, we release the dataset, a data processing tool, and a benchmark at \url{https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CoDesc}.

Masum Hasan, Kazi Sajeed Mehrab, Wasi Uddin Ahmad et al.

We present Text2App -- a framework that allows users to create functional Android applications from natural language specifications. The conventional method of source code generation tries to generate source code directly, which is impractical for creating complex software. We overcome this limitation by transforming natural language into an abstract intermediate formal language representing an application with a substantially smaller number of tokens. The intermediate formal representation is then compiled into target source codes. This abstraction of programming details allows seq2seq networks to learn complex application structures with less overhead. In order to train sequence models, we introduce a data synthesis method grounded in a human survey. We demonstrate that Text2App generalizes well to unseen combination of app components and it is capable of handling noisy natural language instructions. We explore the possibility of creating applications from highly abstract instructions by coupling our system with GPT-3 -- a large pretrained language model. We perform an extensive human evaluation and identify the capabilities and limitations of our system. The source code, a ready-to-run demo notebook, and a demo video are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/text2app/Text2App}.

Masum Hasan, Anindya Iqbal, Mohammad Rafid Ul Islam et al.

Peer code review is a widely adopted software engineering practice to ensure code quality and ensure software reliability in both the commercial and open-source software projects. Due to the large effort overhead associated with practicing code reviews, project managers often wonder, if their code reviews are effective and if there are improvement opportunities in that respect. Since project managers at Samsung Research Bangladesh (SRBD) were also intrigued by these questions, this research developed, deployed, and evaluated a production-ready solution using the Balanced SCorecard (BSC) strategy that SRBD managers can use in their day-to-day management to monitor individual developer's, a particular project's or the entire organization's code review effectiveness. Following the four-step framework of the BSC strategy, we: 1) defined the operation goals of this research, 2) defined a set of metrics to measure the effectiveness of code reviews, 3) developed an automated mechanism to measure those metrics, and 4) developed and evaluated a monitoring application to inform the key stakeholders. Our automated model to identify useful code reviews achieves 7.88% and 14.39% improvement in terms of accuracy and minority class F1 score respectively over the models proposed in prior studies. It also outperforms human evaluators from SRBD, that the model replaces, by a margin of 25.32% and 23.84% respectively in terms of accuracy and minority class F1 score. In our post-deployment survey, SRBD developers and managers indicated that they found our solution as useful and it provided them with important insights to help their decision makings.

Tahmid Hasan, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Kazi Samin et al.

Despite being the seventh most widely spoken language in the world, Bengali has received much less attention in machine translation literature due to being low in resources. Most publicly available parallel corpora for Bengali are not large enough; and have rather poor quality, mostly because of incorrect sentence alignments resulting from erroneous sentence segmentation, and also because of a high volume of noise present in them. In this work, we build a customized sentence segmenter for Bengali and propose two novel methods for parallel corpus creation on low-resource setups: aligner ensembling and batch filtering. With the segmenter and the two methods combined, we compile a high-quality Bengali-English parallel corpus comprising of 2.75 million sentence pairs, more than 2 million of which were not available before. Training on neural models, we achieve an improvement of more than 9 BLEU score over previous approaches to Bengali-English machine translation. We also evaluate on a new test set of 1000 pairs made with extensive quality control. We release the segmenter, parallel corpus, and the evaluation set, thus elevating Bengali from its low-resource status. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever large scale study on Bengali-English machine translation. We believe our study will pave the way for future research on Bengali-English machine translation as well as other low-resource languages. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglanmt.

Aunabil Chakma, Aditya Chakma, Soham Khisa et al.

The geopolitical division between the indigenous Chakma population and mainstream Bangladesh creates a significant cultural and linguistic gap, as the Chakma community, mostly residing in the hill tracts of Bangladesh, maintains distinct cultural traditions and language. Developing a Machine Translation (MT) model or Chakma to Bangla could play a crucial role in alleviating this cultural-linguistic divide. Thus, we have worked on MT between CCP-BN(Chakma-Bangla) by introducing a novel dataset of 15,021 parallel samples and 42,783 monolingual samples of the Chakma Language. Moreover, we introduce a small set for Benchmarking containing 600 parallel samples between Chakma, Bangla, and English. We ran traditional and state-of-the-art models in NLP on the training set, where fine-tuning BanglaT5 with back-translation using transliteration of Chakma achieved the highest BLEU score of 17.8 and 4.41 in CCP-BN and BN-CCP respectively on the Benchmark Dataset. As far as we know, this is the first-ever work on MT for the Chakma Language. Hopefully, this research will help to bridge the gap in linguistic resources and contribute to preserving endangered languages. Our dataset link and codes will be published soon.

Kurtis Haut, Masum Hasan, Thomas Carroll et al.

Serious illness communication (SIC) in end-of-life care faces challenges such as emotional stress, cultural barriers, and balancing hope with honesty. Despite its importance, one of the few available ways for clinicians to practice SIC is with standardized patients, which is expensive, time-consuming, and inflexible. In this paper, we present SOPHIE, an AI-powered standardized patient simulation and automated feedback system. SOPHIE combines large language models (LLMs), a lifelike virtual avatar, and automated, personalized feedback based on clinical literature to provide remote, on-demand SIC training. In a randomized control study with healthcare students and professionals, SOPHIE users demonstrated significant improvement across three critical SIC domains: Empathize, Be Explicit, and Empower. These results suggest that AI-driven tools can enhance complex interpersonal communication skills, offering scalable, accessible solutions to address a critical gap in clinician education.

Masum Hasan, Cengiz Ozel, Nina Long et al.

Hand pose estimation plays a vital role in capturing subtle nonverbal cues essential for understanding human affect. However, collecting diverse, expressive real-world data remains challenging due to labor-intensive manual annotation that often underrepresents demographic diversity and natural expressions. To address this issue, we introduce a cost-effective approach to generating synthetic data using high-fidelity 3D hand models and a wide range of affective hand poses. Our method includes varied skin tones, genders, dynamic environments, realistic lighting conditions, and diverse naturally occurring gesture animations. The resulting dataset, Hi5, contains 583,000 pose-annotated images, carefully balanced to reflect natural diversity and emotional expressiveness. Models trained exclusively on Hi5 achieve performance comparable to human-annotated datasets, exhibiting superior robustness to occlusions and consistent accuracy across diverse skin tones -- which is crucial for reliably recognizing expressive gestures in affective computing applications. Our results demonstrate that synthetic data effectively addresses critical limitations of existing datasets, enabling more inclusive, expressive, and reliable gesture recognition systems while achieving competitive performance in pose estimation benchmarks. The Hi5 dataset, data synthesis pipeline, source code, and game engine project are publicly released to support further research in synthetic hand-gesture applications.

Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Masum Hasan, Md. Mahim Anjum Haque et al.

Millions of repetitive code snippets are submitted to code repositories every day. To search from these large codebases using simple natural language queries would allow programmers to ideate, prototype, and develop easier and faster. Although the existing methods have shown good performance in searching codes when the natural language description contains keywords from the code, they are still far behind in searching codes based on the semantic meaning of the natural language query and semantic structure of the code. In recent years, both natural language and programming language research communities have created techniques to embed them in vector spaces. In this work, we leverage the efficacy of these embedding models using a simple, lightweight 2-layer neural network in the task of semantic code search. We show that our model learns the inherent relationship between the embedding spaces and further probes into the scope of improvement by empirically analyzing the embedding methods. In this analysis, we show that the quality of the code embedding model is the bottleneck for our model's performance, and discuss future directions of study in this area.

Faria Huq, Masum Hasan, Mahim Anzum Haque Pantho et al.

Context: Learning-based automatic program repair techniques are showing promise to provide quality fix suggestions for detected bugs in the source code of the software. These tools mostly exploit historical data of buggy and fixed code changes and are heavily dependent on bug localizers while applying to a new piece of code. With the increasing popularity of code review, dependency on bug localizers can be reduced. Besides, the code review-based bug localization is more trustworthy since reviewers' expertise and experience are reflected in these suggestions. Objective: The natural language instructions scripted on the review comments are enormous sources of information about the bug's nature and expected solutions. However, none of the learning-based tools has utilized the review comments to fix programming bugs to the best of our knowledge. In this study, we investigate the performance improvement of repair techniques using code review comments. Method: We train a sequence-to-sequence model on 55,060 code reviews and associated code changes. We also introduce new tokenization and preprocessing approaches that help to achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art learning-based repair techniques. Results: We boost the top-1 accuracy by 20.33% and top-10 accuracy by 34.82%. We could provide a suggestion for stylistics and non-code errors unaddressed by prior techniques. Conclusion: We believe that the automatic fix suggestions along with code review generated by our approach would help developers address the review comment quickly and correctly and thus save their time and effort.