Hasib Hasan

Sheikh Shafayat, H M Quamran Hasan, Minhajur Rahman Chowdhury Mahim et al. · allen-ai

In this study, we introduce BEnQA, a dataset comprising parallel Bengali and English exam questions for middle and high school levels in Bangladesh. Our dataset consists of approximately 5K questions covering several subjects in science with different types of questions, including factual, application, and reasoning-based questions. We benchmark several Large Language Models (LLMs) with our parallel dataset and observe a notable performance disparity between the models in Bengali and English. We also investigate some prompting methods, and find that Chain-of-Thought prompting is beneficial mostly on reasoning questions, but not so much on factual ones. We also find that appending English translation helps to answer questions in Bengali. Our findings point to promising future research directions for improving the performance of LLMs in Bengali and more generally in low-resource languages.

Tarun Roy, Hasib Hasan, Kowsar Hossain et al.

Despite being one of the most spoken languages in the world ($6^{th}$ based on population), research regarding Bengali handwritten grapheme (smallest functional unit of a writing system) classification has not been explored widely compared to other prominent languages. Moreover, the large number of combinations of graphemes in the Bengali language makes this classification task very challenging. With an effort to contribute to this research problem, we participate in a Kaggle competition \cite{kaggle_link} where the challenge is to separately classify three constituent elements of a Bengali grapheme in the image: grapheme root, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics. We explore the performances of some existing neural network models such as Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and state of the art ResNet50. To further improve the performance we propose our own convolution neural network (CNN) model for Bengali grapheme classification with validation root accuracy 95.32\%, vowel accuracy 98.61\%, and consonant accuracy 98.76\%. We also explore Region Proposal Network (RPN) using VGGNet with a limited setting that can be a potential future direction to improve the performance.