Tahsin Reasat

Samiul Alam, Asif Sushmit, Zaowad Abdullah et al.

Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world with over 300 million speakers globally. Despite its popularity, research into the development of Bengali speech recognition systems is hindered due to the lack of diverse open-source datasets. As a way forward, we have crowdsourced the Bengali Common Voice Speech Dataset, which is a sentence-level automatic speech recognition corpus. Collected on the Mozilla Common Voice platform, the dataset is part of an ongoing campaign that has led to the collection of over 400 hours of data in 2 months and is growing rapidly. Our analysis shows that this dataset has more speaker, phoneme, and environmental diversity compared to the OpenSLR Bengali ASR dataset, the largest existing open-source Bengali speech dataset. We present insights obtained from the dataset and discuss key linguistic challenges that need to be addressed in future versions. Additionally, we report the current performance of a few Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) algorithms and set a benchmark for future research.

Tahsin Reasat, Asif Sushmit, David S. Smith

Deep learning (DL) based diagnostics systems can provide accurate and robust quantitative analysis in digital pathology. These algorithms require large amounts of annotated training data which is impractical in pathology due to the high resolution of histopathological images. Hence, self-supervised methods have been proposed to learn features using ad-hoc pretext tasks. The self-supervised training process uses a large unlabeled dataset which makes the learning process time consuming. In this work, we propose a new method for actively sampling informative members from the training set using a small proxy network, decreasing sample requirement by 93% and training time by 62% while maintaining the same performance of the traditional self-supervised learning method. The code is available on https://github.com/Reasat/data_efficient_cl

Md. Istiak Hossain Shihab, Md. Rakibul Hasan, Mahfuzur Rahman Emon et al.

While strides have been made in deep learning based Bengali Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the past decade, the absence of large Document Layout Analysis (DLA) datasets has hindered the application of OCR in document transcription, e.g., transcribing historical documents and newspapers. Moreover, rule-based DLA systems that are currently being employed in practice are not robust to domain variations and out-of-distribution layouts. To this end, we present the first multidomain large Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset: BaDLAD. This dataset contains 33,695 human annotated document samples from six domains - i) books and magazines, ii) public domain govt. documents, iii) liberation war documents, iv) newspapers, v) historical newspapers, and vi) property deeds, with 710K polygon annotations for four unit types: text-box, paragraph, image, and table. Through preliminary experiments benchmarking the performance of existing state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for English DLA, we demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset in training deep learning based Bengali document digitization models.

Tahsin Reasat, Stephen Chenard, Akhil Rekulapelli et al.

Accurate musculoskeletal soft tissue tumor segmentation is vital for assessing tumor size, location, diagnosis, and response to treatment, thereby influencing patient outcomes. However, segmentation of these tumors requires clinical expertise, and an automated segmentation model would save valuable time for both clinician and patient. Training an automatic model requires a large dataset of annotated images. In this work, we describe the collection of an MR imaging dataset of 199 musculoskeletal soft tissue tumors from 199 patients. We trained segmentation models on this dataset and then benchmarked them on a publicly available dataset. Our model achieved the state-of-the-art dice score of 0.79 out of the box without any fine tuning, which shows the diversity and utility of our curated dataset. We analyzed the model predictions and found that its performance suffered on fibrous and vascular tumors due to their diverse anatomical location, size, and intensity heterogeneity. The code and models are available in the following github repository, https://github.com/Reasat/mstt

Shimanto Bhowmik, Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Md Sazzad Islam et al.

Bengali is an underrepresented language in NLP research. However, it remains a challenge due to its unique linguistic structure and computational constraints. In this work, we systematically investigate the challenges that hinder Bengali NLP performance by focusing on the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. We then evaluated 10 recent open source Large Language Models (LLMs) in 8 of the translated datasets and performed a comprehensive error analysis to pinpoint their primary failure modes. Our findings reveal consistent performance gaps for Bengali compared to English, particularly for smaller models and specific model families like Mistral. We also identified promising robustness in certain architectures, such as DeepSeek, that maintain more stable performance across languages. Our analysis reveals an inverse relationship between tokenization efficiency and LLM accuracy where models tend to perform worse when inputs are excessively tokenized, whereas more efficient \& concise tokenization results in improved performance. These findings highlight critical areas where current models fall short and underscore the need for improved dataset quality and evaluation methodologies tailored to multilingual contexts. This work will catalyze further research on NLP for underrepresented languages, helping to democratize access to advanced language technologies worldwide. The code and dataset used in this research is publicly available at https://github.com/BengaliAI/bn-llm-benchmark.

Samiul Alam, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit et al.

Latin has historically led the state-of-the-art in handwritten optical character recognition (OCR) research. Adapting existing systems from Latin to alpha-syllabary languages is particularly challenging due to a sharp contrast between their orthographies. The segmentation of graphical constituents corresponding to characters becomes significantly hard due to a cursive writing system and frequent use of diacritics in the alpha-syllabary family of languages. We propose a labeling scheme based on graphemes (linguistic segments of word formation) that makes segmentation in-side alpha-syllabary words linear and present the first dataset of Bengali handwritten graphemes that are commonly used in an everyday context. The dataset contains 411k curated samples of 1295 unique commonly used Bengali graphemes. Additionally, the test set contains 900 uncommon Bengali graphemes for out of dictionary performance evaluation. The dataset is open-sourced as a part of a public Handwritten Grapheme Classification Challenge on Kaggle to benchmark vision algorithms for multi-target grapheme classification. The unique graphemes present in this dataset are selected based on commonality in the Google Bengali ASR corpus. From competition proceedings, we see that deep-learning methods can generalize to a large span of out of dictionary graphemes which are absent during training. Dataset and starter codes at www.kaggle.com/c/bengaliai-cv19.

Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Azmol Hossain, Rubayet Sabbir Faruque et al.

Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available

Fazle Rabbi Rakib, Souhardya Saha Dip, Samiul Alam et al.

We present OOD-Speech, the first out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarking dataset for Bengali automatic speech recognition (ASR). Being one of the most spoken languages globally, Bengali portrays large diversity in dialects and prosodic features, which demands ASR frameworks to be robust towards distribution shifts. For example, islamic religious sermons in Bengali are delivered with a tonality that is significantly different from regular speech. Our training dataset is collected via massively online crowdsourcing campaigns which resulted in 1177.94 hours collected and curated from $22,645$ native Bengali speakers from South Asia. Our test dataset comprises 23.03 hours of speech collected and manually annotated from 17 different sources, e.g., Bengali TV drama, Audiobook, Talk show, Online class, and Islamic sermons to name a few. OOD-Speech is jointly the largest publicly available speech dataset, as well as the first out-of-distribution ASR benchmarking dataset for Bengali.

Nazmuddoha Ansary, Quazi Adibur Rahman Adib, Tahsin Reasat et al.

Writing systems of Indic languages have orthographic syllables, also known as complex graphemes, as unique horizontal units. A prominent feature of these languages is these complex grapheme units that comprise consonants/consonant conjuncts, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics, which, together make a unique Language. Unicode-based writing schemes of these languages often disregard this feature of these languages and encode words as linear sequences of Unicode characters using an intricate scheme of connector characters and font interpreters. Due to this way of using a few dozen Unicode glyphs to write thousands of different unique glyphs (complex graphemes), there are serious ambiguities that lead to malformed words. In this paper, we are proposing two libraries: i) a normalizer for normalizing inconsistencies caused by a Unicode-based encoding scheme for Indic languages and ii) a grapheme parser for Abugida text. It deconstructs words into visually distinct orthographic syllables or complex graphemes and their constituents. Our proposed normalizer is a more efficient and effective tool than the previously used IndicNLP normalizer. Moreover, our parser and normalizer are also suitable tools for general Abugida text processing as they performed well in our robust word-based and NLP experiments. We report the pipeline for the scripts of 7 languages in this work and develop the framework for the integration of more scripts.

Sharif Amit Kamran, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Samiul Alam et al.

Solving problems with Artificial intelligence in a competitive manner has long been absent in Bangladesh and Bengali-speaking community. On the other hand, there has not been a well structured database for Bengali Handwritten digits for mass public use. To bring out the best minds working in machine learning and use their expertise to create a model which can easily recognize Bengali Handwritten digits, we organized Bengali.AI Computer Vision Challenge.The challenge saw both local and international teams participating with unprecedented efforts.

Samiul Alam, Tahsin Reasat, Rashed Mohammad Doha et al.

To benchmark Bengali digit recognition algorithms, a large publicly available dataset is required which is free from biases originating from geographical location, gender, and age. With this aim in mind, NumtaDB, a dataset consisting of more than 85,000 images of hand-written Bengali digits, has been assembled. This paper documents the collection and curation process of numerals along with the salient statistics of the dataset.

Tahsin Reasat, Celia Shahnaz

Myocardial Infarction is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. This paper presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which takes raw Electrocardiography (ECG) signal from lead II, III and AVF and differentiates between inferior myocardial infarction (IMI) and healthy signals. The performance of the model is evaluated on IMI and healthy signals obtained from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) database. A subject-oriented approach is taken to comprehend the generalization capability of the model and compared with the current state of the art. In a subject-oriented approach, the network is tested on one patient and trained on rest of the patients. Our model achieved a superior metrics scores (accuracy= 84.54%, sensitivity= 85.33% and specificity= 84.09%) when compared to the benchmark. We also analyzed the discriminating strength of the features extracted by the convolutional layers by means of geometric separability index and euclidean distance and compared it with the benchmark model.