Sumit Kumar Banshal

Md Abdullah Al Kafi, Sumit Kumar Banshal

This study proposes a language-agnostic transformer-based POS tagging framework designed for low-resource languages, using Bangla and Hindi as case studies. With only three lines of framework-specific code, the model was adapted from Bangla to Hindi, demonstrating effective portability with minimal modification. The framework achieves 96.85 percent and 97 percent token-level accuracy across POS categories in Bangla and Hindi while sustaining strong F1 scores despite dataset imbalance and linguistic overlap. A performance discrepancy in a specific POS category underscores ongoing challenges in dataset curation. The strong results stem from the underlying transformer architecture, which can be replaced with limited code adjustments. Its modular and open-source design enables rapid cross-lingual adaptation while reducing model design and tuning overhead, allowing researchers to focus on linguistic preprocessing and dataset refinement, which are essential for advancing NLP in underrepresented languages.

Sumit Kumar Banshal, Sajal Das, Shumaiya Akter Shammi et al.

In recent years, Sentiment Analysis (SA) and Emotion Recognition (ER) have been increasingly popular in the Bangla language, which is the seventh most spoken language throughout the entire world. However, the language is structurally complicated, which makes this field arduous to extract emotions in an accurate manner. Several distinct approaches such as the extraction of positive and negative sentiments as well as multiclass emotions, have been implemented in this field of study. Nevertheless, the extraction of multiple sentiments is an almost untouched area in this language. Which involves identifying several feelings based on a single piece of text. Therefore, this study demonstrates a thorough method for constructing an annotated corpus based on scrapped data from Facebook to bridge the gaps in this subject area to overcome the challenges. To make this annotation more fruitful, the context-based approach has been used. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a well-known methodology of transformers, have been shown the best results of all methods implemented. Finally, a web application has been developed to demonstrate the performance of the pre-trained top-performer model (BERT) for multi-label ER in Bangla.

Md Abdullah Al Kafi, Raka Moni, Sumit Kumar Banshal

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental health counseling faces the dual challenges of hallucinations and lack of empathy. While the former may be mitigated by RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) by anchoring answers in trusted clinical sources, there remains an open question as to whether the most effective model under this paradigm would be one that is fine-tuned on mental health data, or a more general and powerful model that succeeds purely on the basis of reasoning. In this paper, we perform a direct comparison by running four open-source models through the same RAG pipeline using ChromaDB: two generalist reasoners (Qwen2.5-3B and Phi-3-Mini) and two domain-specific fine-tunes (MentalHealthBot-7B and TherapyBot-7B). We use an LLM-as-a-Judge framework to automate evaluation over 50 turns. We find a clear trend: the generalist models outperform the domain-specific ones in empathy (3.72 vs. 3.26, $p < 0.001$) in spite of being much smaller (3B vs. 7B), and all models perform well in terms of safety, but the generalist models show better contextual understanding and are less prone to overfitting as we observe in the domain-specific models. Overall, our results indicate that for RAG-based therapy systems, strong reasoning is more important than training on mental health-specific vocabulary; i.e. a well-reasoned general model would provide more empathetic and balanced support than a larger narrowly fine-tuned model, so long as the answer is already grounded in clinical evidence.

Md Abdullah Al Kafi, Raka Moni, Sumit Kumar Banshal

Text normalization is an essential preprocessing step in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and stemming is one such normalization technique that reduces words to their base or root form. However, evaluating stemming methods is challenging because current evaluation approaches are limited and do not capture the potential harm caused by excessive stemming; therefore, it is essential to develop new approaches to evaluate stemming methods. To address this issue, this study propose a novel, task-oriented approach to evaluate stemming methods, which considers three aspects: (1) the utility of stemming using Stemming Effectiveness Score (SES), (2) the impact of stemming on downstream tasks using Model Performance Delta (MPD), and (3) the semantic similarity between stemmed and original words using Average Normalized Levenshtein Distance (ANLD), thus providing a comprehensive evaluation framework. We apply our evaluation framework to compare two stemmers for Bangla (BNLTK) and English (Snowball), and our results reveal a significant issue, prompting us to analyze their performance in detail. While the Bangla stemmer achieves the highest SES (1.67) due to effective word reduction (CR = 1.90), SES alone is insufficient because our proposed safety measure, ANLD, reveals that this high SES is due to harmful over-stemming (ANLD = 0.26), which correlates with the observed decrease in downstream performance.In contrast, the English stemmer achieves a moderate SES (1.31) with a safe meaning distance (ANLD = 0.14), allowing its word reduction to contribute positively to downstream performance; therefore, it is a more reliable stemmer. Our study provides a valuable tool for distinguishing between potential efficiency gains (high SES) and meaning preservation (low ANLD).

Md Abdullah Al Kafi, Raka Moni, Sumit Kumar Banshal

Background and Objective: Deep learning models have high computational needs and lack interpretability but are often the first choice for medical image classification tasks. This study addresses whether complex neural networks are essential for the simple binary classification task of malaria. We introduce the Extracted Morphological Feature Engineered (EMFE) pipeline, a transparent, reproducible, and low compute machine learning approach tailored explicitly for simple cell morphology, designed to achieve deep learning performance levels on a simple CPU only setup with the practical aim of real world deployment. Methods: The study used the NIH Malaria Cell Images dataset, with two features extracted from each cell image: the number of non background pixels and the number of holes within the cell. Logistic Regression and Random Forest were compared against ResNet18, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet across accuracy, model size, and CPU inference time. An ensemble model was created by combining Logistic Regression and Random Forests to achieve higher accuracy while retaining efficiency. Results: The single variable Logistic Regression model achieved a test accuracy of 94.80 percent with a file size of 1.2 kB and negligible inference latency (2.3 ms). The two stage ensemble improved accuracy to 97.15 percent. In contrast, the deep learning methods require 13.6 MB to 44.7 MB of storage and show significantly higher inference times (68 ms). Conclusion: This study shows that a compact feature engineering approach can produce clinically meaningful classification performance while offering gains in transparency, reproducibility, speed, and deployment feasibility. The proposed pipeline demonstrates that simple interpretable features paired with lightweight models can serve as a practical diagnostic solution for environments with limited computational resources.

Md Abdullah Al Kafi, Sumit Kumar Banshal, Md Sadman Shakib et al.

One of the most alarming issues in digital society is hate speech (HS) on social media. The severity is so high that researchers across the globe are captivated by this domain. A notable amount of work has been conducted to address the identification and alarm system. However, a noticeable gap exists, especially for low-resource languages. Comprehensive datasets are the main problem among the constrained resource languages, such as Bangla. Interestingly, hate speech or any particular speech has no single dimensionality. Similarly, the hate component can simultaneously have multiple abusive attributes, which seems to be missed in the existing datasets. Thus, a multi-label Bangla hate speech dataset named BOISHOMMO has been compiled and evaluated in this work. That includes categories of HS across race, gender, religion, politics, and more. With over two thousand annotated examples, BOISHOMMO provides a nuanced understanding of hate speech in Bangla and highlights the complexities of processing non-Latin scripts. Apart from evaluating with multiple algorithmic approaches, it also highlights the complexities of processing Bangla text and assesses model performance. This unique multi-label approach enriches future hate speech detection and analysis studies for low-resource languages by providing a more nuanced, diverse dataset.