Quazi Sarwar Muhtaseem

Rabindra Nath Nandi, Mehadi Hasan Menon, Tareq Al Muntasir et al.

One of the major challenges for developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages is the limited access to labeled data with domain-specific variations. In this study, we propose a pseudo-labeling approach to develop a large-scale domain-agnostic ASR dataset. With the proposed methodology, we developed a 20k+ hours labeled Bangla speech dataset covering diverse topics, speaking styles, dialects, noisy environments, and conversational scenarios. We then exploited the developed corpus to design a conformer-based ASR system. We benchmarked the trained ASR with publicly available datasets and compared it with other available models. To investigate the efficacy, we designed and developed a human-annotated domain-agnostic test set composed of news, telephony, and conversational data among others. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the model trained on psuedo-label data for the designed test-set along with publicly-available Bangla datasets. The experimental resources will be publicly available.(https://github.com/hishab-nlp/Pseudo-Labeling-for-Domain-Agnostic-Bangla-ASR)

Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Sagor Sarker et al.

In this paper, we present TituLLMs, the first large pretrained Bangla LLMs, available in 1b and 3b parameter sizes. Due to computational constraints during both training and inference, we focused on smaller models. To train TituLLMs, we collected a pretraining dataset of approximately ~37 billion tokens. We extended the Llama-3.2 tokenizer to incorporate language- and culture-specific knowledge, which also enables faster training and inference. There was a lack of benchmarking datasets to benchmark LLMs for Bangla. To address this gap, we developed five benchmarking datasets. We benchmarked various LLMs, including TituLLMs, and demonstrated that TituLLMs outperforms its initial multilingual versions. However, this is not always the case, highlighting the complexities of language adaptation. Our work lays the groundwork for adapting existing multilingual open models to other low-resource languages. To facilitate broader adoption and further research, we have made the TituLLMs models and benchmarking datasets publicly available (https://huggingface.co/collections/hishab/titulm-llama-family-6718d31fc1b83529276f490a).

Kanchon Gharami, Quazi Sarwar Muhtaseem, Deepti Gupta et al.

The development of robust transliteration techniques to enhance the effectiveness of transforming Romanized scripts into native scripts is crucial for Natural Language Processing tasks, including sentiment analysis, speech recognition, information retrieval, and intelligent personal assistants. Despite significant advancements, state-of-the-art multilingual models still face challenges in handling Romanized script, where the Roman alphabet is adopted to represent the phonetic structure of diverse languages. Within the South Asian context, where the use of Romanized script for Indo-Aryan languages is widespread across social media and digital communication platforms, such usage continues to pose significant challenges for cutting-edge multilingual models. While a limited number of transliteration datasets and models are available for Indo-Aryan languages, they generally lack sufficient diversity in pronunciation and spelling variations, adequate code-mixed data for large language model (LLM) training, and low-resource adaptation. To address this research gap, we introduce a novel transliteration dataset for two popular Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi and Bengali, which are ranked as the 3rd and 7th most spoken languages worldwide. Our dataset comprises nearly 1.8 million Hindi and 1 million Bengali transliteration pairs. In addition to that, we pre-train a custom multilingual seq2seq LLM based on Marian architecture using the developed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements compared to existing relevant models in terms of BLEU and CER metrics.