CVAug 21, 2023Code
bbOCR: An Open-source Multi-domain OCR Pipeline for Bengali DocumentsImam Mohammad Zulkarnain, Shayekh Bin Islam, Md. Zami Al Zunaed Farabe et al.
Despite the existence of numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, the lack of comprehensive open-source systems hampers the progress of document digitization in various low-resource languages, including Bengali. Low-resource languages, especially those with an alphasyllabary writing system, suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets for various document OCR components such as word-level OCR, document layout extraction, and distortion correction; which are available as individual modules in high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce Bengali$.$AI-BRACU-OCR (bbOCR): an open-source scalable document OCR system that can reconstruct Bengali documents into a structured searchable digitized format that leverages a novel Bengali text recognition model and two novel synthetic datasets. We present extensive component-level and system-level evaluation: both use a novel diversified evaluation dataset and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation suggests that our proposed solution is preferable over the current state-of-the-art Bengali OCR systems. The source codes and datasets are available here: https://bengaliai.github.io/bbocr.
CLApr 21, 2022
TEAM-Atreides at SemEval-2022 Task 11: On leveraging data augmentation and ensemble to recognize complex Named Entities in BanglaNazia Tasnim, Md. Istiak Hossain Shihab, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit et al.
Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively pretrained on the Bangla language with the performance of ELECTRA-based models pretrained on English to achieve competitive performance on the Track-11. Besides providing a system description, we will also present the outcomes of our experiments on architectural decisions, dataset augmentations, and post-competition findings.
CVMar 9, 2023
BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis DatasetMd. 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.
CLNov 10, 2023
BanglaBait: Semi-Supervised Adversarial Approach for Clickbait Detection on Bangla Clickbait DatasetMd. Motahar Mahtab, Monirul Haque, Mehedi Hasan et al.
Intentionally luring readers to click on a particular content by exploiting their curiosity defines a title as clickbait. Although several studies focused on detecting clickbait titles in English articles, low resource language like Bangla has not been given adequate attention. To tackle clickbait titles in Bangla, we have constructed the first Bangla clickbait detection dataset containing 15,056 labeled news articles and 65,406 unlabelled news articles extracted from clickbait dense news sites. Each article has been labeled by three expert linguists and includes an article's title, body, and other metadata. By incorporating labeled and unlabelled data, we finetune a pretrained Bangla transformer model in an adversarial fashion using Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS GANs). The proposed model acts as a good baseline for this dataset, outperforming traditional neural network models (LSTM, GRU, CNN) and linguistic feature based models. We expect that this dataset and the detailed analysis and comparison of these clickbait detection models will provide a fundamental basis for future research into detecting clickbait titles in Bengali articles. We have released the corresponding code and dataset.
IVSep 27, 2024
Med-IC: Fusing a Single Layer Involution with Convolutions for Enhanced Medical Image Classification and SegmentationMd. Farhadul Islam, Sarah Zabeen, Meem Arafat Manab et al.
The majority of medical images, especially those that resemble cells, have similar characteristics. These images, which occur in a variety of shapes, often show abnormalities in the organ or cell region. The convolution operation possesses a restricted capability to extract visual patterns across several spatial regions of an image. The involution process, which is the inverse operation of convolution, complements this inherent lack of spatial information extraction present in convolutions. In this study, we investigate how applying a single layer of involution prior to a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture can significantly improve classification and segmentation performance, with a comparatively negligible amount of weight parameters. The study additionally shows how excessive use of involution layers might result in inaccurate predictions in a particular type of medical image. According to our findings from experiments, the strategy of adding only a single involution layer before a CNN-based model outperforms most of the previous works.
CLDec 16, 2025
A Comparative Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Techniques for Bengali Standard-to-Dialect Machine Translation Using LLMsK. M. Jubair Sami, Dipto Sumit, Ariyan Hossain et al.
Translating from a standard language to its regional dialects is a significant NLP challenge due to scarce data and linguistic variation, a problem prominent in the Bengali language. This paper proposes and compares two novel RAG pipelines for standard-to-dialectal Bengali translation. The first, a Transcript-Based Pipeline, uses large dialect sentence contexts from audio transcripts. The second, a more effective Standardized Sentence-Pairs Pipeline, utilizes structured local\_dialect:standard\_bengali sentence pairs. We evaluated both pipelines across six Bengali dialects and multiple LLMs using BLEU, ChrF, WER, and BERTScore. Our findings show that the sentence-pair pipeline consistently outperforms the transcript-based one, reducing Word Error Rate (WER) from 76\% to 55\% for the Chittagong dialect. Critically, this RAG approach enables smaller models (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B) to outperform much larger models (e.g., GPT-OSS-120B), demonstrating that a well-designed retrieval strategy can be more crucial than model size. This work contributes an effective, fine-tuning-free solution for low-resource dialect translation, offering a practical blueprint for preserving linguistic diversity.
CLJan 15
Representation-Aware Unlearning via Activation Signatures: From Suppression to Knowledge-Signature ErasureSyed Naveed Mahmood, Md. Rezaur Rahman Bhuiyan, Tasfia Zaman et al.
Selective knowledge erasure from LLMs is critical for GDPR compliance and model safety, yet current unlearning methods conflate behavioral suppression with true knowledge removal, allowing latent capabilities to persist beneath surface-level refusals. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing Knowledge Immunization Framework (KIF), a representation-aware architecture that distinguishes genuine erasure from obfuscation by targeting internal activation signatures rather than surface outputs. Our approach combines dynamic suppression of subject-specific representations with parameter-efficient adaptation, enabling durable unlearning without full model retraining. KIF achieves near-oracle erasure (FQ approx 0.99 vs. 1.00) while preserving utility at oracle levels (MU = 0.62), effectively breaking the stability-erasure tradeoff that has constrained all prior work. We evaluate both standard foundation models (Llama and Mistral) and reasoning-prior models (Qwen and DeepSeek) across 3B to 14B parameters. Our observation shows that standard models exhibit scale-independent true erasure (<3% utility drift), while reasoning-prior models reveal fundamental architectural divergence. Our comprehensive dual-metric evaluation protocol, combining surface-level leakage with latent trace persistence, operationalizes the obfuscation - erasure distinction and enables the first systematic diagnosis of mechanism-level forgetting behavior across model families and scales.
CLNov 11, 2025
BNLI: A Linguistically-Refined Bengali Dataset for Natural Language InferenceFarah Binta Haque, Md Yasin, Shishir Saha et al.
Despite the growing progress in Natural Language Inference (NLI) research, resources for the Bengali language remain extremely limited. Existing Bengali NLI datasets exhibit several inconsistencies, including annotation errors, ambiguous sentence pairs, and inadequate linguistic diversity, which hinder effective model training and evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce BNLI, a refined and linguistically curated Bengali NLI dataset designed to support robust language understanding and inference modeling. The dataset was constructed through a rigorous annotation pipeline emphasizing semantic clarity and balance across entailment, contradiction, and neutrality classes. We benchmarked BNLI using a suite of state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures, including multilingual and Bengali-specific models, to assess their ability to capture complex semantic relations in Bengali text. The experimental findings highlight the improved reliability and interpretability achieved with BNLI, establishing it as a strong foundation for advancing research in Bengali and other low-resource language inference tasks.
45.5AIApr 16
Enhancing Mental Health Counseling Support in Bangladesh using Culturally-Grounded KnowledgeMd Arid Hasan, Azhagu Meena SP, Aditya Khan et al.
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in generating supportive responses for mental health and counseling applications. However, their responses often lack cultural sensitivity, contextual grounding, and clinically appropriate guidance. This work addresses the gap of how to systematically incorporate domain-specific, clinically validated knowledge into LLMs to improve counseling quality. We utilize and compare two approaches, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a knowledge graph (KG)-based method, designed to support para-counselors. Our KG is constructed manually and clinically validated, capturing causal relationships between stressors, interventions, and outcomes, with contributions from multidisciplinary people. We evaluated multiple LLMs in both settings using BERTScore F1 and SBERT cosine similarity, as well as human evaluation across five metrics, which is designed to directly measure the effectiveness of counseling beyond similarity at the surface level. The results show that KG-based approaches consistently improve contextual relevance, clinical appropriateness, and practical usability compared to RAG alone, demonstrating that structured, expert-validated knowledge plays a critical role in addressing LLMs limitations in counseling tasks.
37.2CLApr 29
Exploring the Limits of Pruning: Task-Specific Neurons, Model Collapse, and Recovery in Task-Specific Large Language ModelsM. K. Khalidi Siam, Md. Tausif-Ul-Islam, Md. Reshad Romim Khan et al.
Neuron pruning is widely used to reduce the computational cost and parameter footprint of large language models, yet it remains unclear whether neurons in task-specific models contribute uniformly to task performance. In this work, we provide empirical evidence for the existence and importance of task-specific neurons through a systematic pruning study on language models specialized for mathematical reasoning and code generation. We introduce an activation-based selectivity metric to identify neurons with low contribution to the target task and prune them while preserving target-task accuracy, and compare selective pruning with random pruning. Selective pruning consistently outperforms random pruning, indicating that activation-based selectivity provides a systematic advantage over random pruning. Reverse pruning experiments further show that removing a small subset of highly task-specific neurons (~10%) causes complete performance collapse, suggesting that there exist task specific neurons and critical task information is concentrated in a small portion of the network. In contrast, selective pruning of less critical neurons (~30% - ~35%) reduces accuracy but still preserves significant performance. We also observed consistent reductions in parameters and runtime VRAM usage, along with improved inference throughput as pruning increases. Experiments on both 1.5B and 7B models reveal a robustness threshold around 15-20% pruning, beyond which accuracy loss and generation failures increase sharply. Fine-tuning substantially recovers performance across pruning levels, particularly for aggressively pruned models. These findings provide empirical evidence of neuron specialization in task-specific language models and offer insights into pruning robustness, model redundancy, and post-pruning recoverability.
54.8CLMar 22
Benchmarking Bengali Dialectal Bias: A Multi-Stage Framework Integrating RAG-Based Translation and Human-Augmented RLAIFK. M. Jubair Sami, Dipto Sumit, Ariyan Hossain et al.
Large language models (LLMs) frequently exhibit performance biases against regional dialects of low-resource languages. However, frameworks to quantify these disparities remain scarce. We propose a two-phase framework to evaluate dialectal bias in LLM question-answering across nine Bengali dialects. First, we translate and gold-label standard Bengali questions into dialectal variants adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to prepare 4,000 question sets. Since traditional translation quality evaluation metrics fail on unstandardized dialects, we evaluate fidelity using an LLM-as-a-judge, which human correlation confirms outperforms legacy metrics. Second, we benchmark 19 LLMs across these gold-labeled sets, running 68,395 RLAIF evaluations validated through multi-judge agreement and human fallback. Our findings reveal severe performance drops linked to linguistic divergence. For instance, responses to the highly divergent Chittagong dialect score 5.44/10, compared to 7.68/10 for Tangail. Furthermore, increased model scale does not consistently mitigate this bias. We contribute a validated translation quality evaluation method, a rigorous benchmark dataset, and a Critical Bias Sensitivity (CBS) metric for safety-critical applications.
CVJan 7, 2024
Involution Fused ConvNet for Classifying Eye-Tracking Patterns of Children with Autism Spectrum DisorderMd. Farhadul Islam, Meem Arafat Manab, Joyanta Jyoti Mondal et al.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complicated neurological condition which is challenging to diagnose. Numerous studies demonstrate that children diagnosed with autism struggle with maintaining attention spans and have less focused vision. The eye-tracking technology has drawn special attention in the context of ASD since anomalies in gaze have long been acknowledged as a defining feature of autism in general. Deep Learning (DL) approaches coupled with eye-tracking sensors are exploiting additional capabilities to advance the diagnostic and its applications. By learning intricate nonlinear input-output relations, DL can accurately recognize the various gaze and eye-tracking patterns and adjust to the data. Convolutions alone are insufficient to capture the important spatial information in gaze patterns or eye tracking. The dynamic kernel-based process known as involutions can improve the efficiency of classifying gaze patterns or eye tracking data. In this paper, we utilise two different image-processing operations to see how these processes learn eye-tracking patterns. Since these patterns are primarily based on spatial information, we use involution with convolution making it a hybrid, which adds location-specific capability to a deep learning model. Our proposed model is implemented in a simple yet effective approach, which makes it easier for applying in real life. We investigate the reasons why our approach works well for classifying eye-tracking patterns. For comparative analysis, we experiment with two separate datasets as well as a combined version of both. The results show that IC with three involution layers outperforms the previous approaches.
CLJan 30, 2024
Gazetteer-Enhanced Bangla Named Entity Recognition with BanglaBERT Semantic Embeddings K-Means-Infused CRF ModelNiloy Farhan, Saman Sarker Joy, Tafseer Binte Mannan et al.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a sub-task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that distinguishes entities from unorganized text into predefined categorization. In recent years, a lot of Bangla NLP subtasks have received quite a lot of attention; but Named Entity Recognition in Bangla still lags behind. In this research, we explored the existing state of research in Bangla Named Entity Recognition. We tried to figure out the limitations that current techniques and datasets face, and we would like to address these limitations in our research. Additionally, We developed a Gazetteer that has the ability to significantly boost the performance of NER. We also proposed a new NER solution by taking advantage of state-of-the-art NLP tools that outperform conventional techniques.
CLApr 17, 2024
Mapping Violence: Developing an Extensive Framework to Build a Bangla Sectarian Expression Dataset from Social Media InteractionsNazia Tasnim, Sujan Sen Gupta, Md. Istiak Hossain Shihab et al.
Communal violence in online forums has become extremely prevalent in South Asia, where many communities of different cultures coexist and share resources. These societies exhibit a phenomenon characterized by strong bonds within their own groups and animosity towards others, leading to conflicts that frequently escalate into violent confrontations. To address this issue, we have developed the first comprehensive framework for the automatic detection of communal violence markers in online Bangla content accompanying the largest collection (13K raw sentences) of social media interactions that fall under the definition of four major violence class and their 16 coarse expressions. Our workflow introduces a 7-step expert annotation process incorporating insights from social scientists, linguists, and psychologists. By presenting data statistics and benchmarking performance using this dataset, we have determined that, aside from the category of Non-communal violence, Religio-communal violence is particularly pervasive in Bangla text. Moreover, we have substantiated the effectiveness of fine-tuning language models in identifying violent comments by conducting preliminary benchmarking on the state-of-the-art Bangla deep learning model.
CLOct 28, 2025
RegSpeech12: A Regional Corpus of Bengali Spontaneous Speech Across DialectsMd. Rezuwan Hassan, Azmol Hossain, Kanij Fatema et al.
The Bengali language, spoken extensively across South Asia and among diasporic communities, exhibits considerable dialectal diversity shaped by geography, culture, and history. Phonological and pronunciation-based classifications broadly identify five principal dialect groups: Eastern Bengali, Manbhumi, Rangpuri, Varendri, and Rarhi. Within Bangladesh, further distinctions emerge through variation in vocabulary, syntax, and morphology, as observed in regions such as Chittagong, Sylhet, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Noakhali, and Barishal. Despite this linguistic richness, systematic research on the computational processing of Bengali dialects remains limited. This study seeks to document and analyze the phonetic and morphological properties of these dialects while exploring the feasibility of building computational models particularly Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems tailored to regional varieties. Such efforts hold potential for applications in virtual assistants and broader language technologies, contributing to both the preservation of dialectal diversity and the advancement of inclusive digital tools for Bengali-speaking communities. The dataset created for this study is released for public use.
CLNov 18, 2025
Bridging Human and Model Perspectives: A Comparative Analysis of Political Bias Detection in News Media Using Large Language ModelsShreya Adrita Banik, Niaz Nafi Rahman, Tahsina Moiukh et al.
Detecting political bias in news media is a complex task that requires interpreting subtle linguistic and contextual cues. Although recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have enabled automatic bias classification, the extent to which large language models (LLMs) align with human judgment still remains relatively underexplored and not yet well understood. This study aims to present a comparative framework for evaluating the detection of political bias across human annotations and multiple LLMs, including GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, and FLAN. We construct a manually annotated dataset of news articles and assess annotation consistency, bias polarity, and inter-model agreement to quantify divergence between human and model perceptions of bias. Experimental results show that among traditional transformer-based models, RoBERTa achieves the highest alignment with human labels, whereas generative models such as GPT demonstrate the strongest overall agreement with human annotations in a zero-shot setting. Among all transformer-based baselines, our fine-tuned RoBERTa model acquired the highest accuracy and the strongest alignment with human-annotated labels. Our findings highlight systematic differences in how humans and LLMs perceive political slant, underscoring the need for hybrid evaluation frameworks that combine human interpretability with model scalability in automated media bias detection.
CLOct 27, 2025
Are ASR foundation models generalized enough to capture features of regional dialects for low-resource languages?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
CLOct 22, 2025
From Facts to Folklore: Evaluating Large Language Models on Bengali Cultural KnowledgeNafis Chowdhury, Moinul Haque, Anika Ahmed et al.
Recent progress in NLP research has demonstrated remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. While recent multilingual benchmarks have advanced cultural evaluation for LLMs, critical gaps remain in capturing the nuances of low-resource cultures. Our work addresses these limitations through a Bengali Language Cultural Knowledge (BLanCK) dataset including folk traditions, culinary arts, and regional dialects. Our investigation of several multilingual language models shows that while these models perform well in non-cultural categories, they struggle significantly with cultural knowledge and performance improves substantially across all models when context is provided, emphasizing context-aware architectures and culturally curated training data.
CLOct 7, 2025
A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and DefensesAsif Shahriar, Md Nafiu Rahman, Sadif Ahmed et al.
The rapid shift from passive LLMs to autonomous LLM-agents marks a new paradigm in cybersecurity. While these agents can act as powerful tools for both offensive and defensive operations, the very agentic context introduces a new class of inherent security risks. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around three interdependent pillars: Applications, Threats, and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 150 papers, explaining how agents are used, the vulnerabilities they possess, and the countermeasures designed to protect them. A detailed cross-cutting analysis shows emerging trends in agent architecture while revealing critical research gaps in model and modality coverage.
CVAug 18, 2025
Eyes on the Image: Gaze Supervised Multimodal Learning for Chest X-ray Diagnosis and Report GenerationTanjim Islam Riju, Shuchismita Anwar, Saman Sarker Joy et al.
We propose a two-stage multimodal framework that enhances disease classification and region-aware radiology report generation from chest X-rays, leveraging the MIMIC-Eye dataset. In the first stage, we introduce a gaze-guided contrastive learning architecture for disease classification. It integrates visual features, clinical labels, bounding boxes, and radiologist eye-tracking signals and is equipped with a novel multi-term gaze-attention loss combining MSE, KL divergence, correlation, and center-of-mass alignment. Incorporating fixations improves F1 score from 0.597 to 0.631 (+5.70%) and AUC from 0.821 to 0.849 (+3.41%), while also improving precision and recall, highlighting the effectiveness of gaze-informed attention supervision. In the second stage, we present a modular report generation pipeline that extracts confidence-weighted diagnostic keywords, maps them to anatomical regions using a curated dictionary constructed from domain-specific priors, and generates region-aligned sentences via structured prompts. This pipeline improves report quality as measured by clinical keyword recall and ROUGE overlap. Our results demonstrate that integrating gaze data improves both classification performance and the interpretability of generated medical reports.
CLJun 24, 2025
How Effectively Can BERT Models Interpret Context and Detect Bengali Communal Violent Text?Abdullah Khondoker, Enam Ahmed Taufik, Md. Iftekhar Islam Tashik et al.
The spread of cyber hatred has led to communal violence, fueling aggression and conflicts between various religious, ethnic, and social groups, posing a significant threat to social harmony. Despite its critical importance, the classification of communal violent text remains an underexplored area in existing research. This study aims to enhance the accuracy of detecting text that incites communal violence, focusing specifically on Bengali textual data sourced from social media platforms. We introduce a fine-tuned BanglaBERT model tailored for this task, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.60. To address the issue of data imbalance, our dataset was expanded by adding 1,794 instances, which facilitated the development and evaluation of a fine-tuned ensemble model. This ensemble model demonstrated an improved performance, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.63, thus highlighting its effectiveness in this domain. In addition to quantitative performance metrics, qualitative analysis revealed instances where the models struggled with context understanding, leading to occasional misclassifications, even when predictions were made with high confidence. Through analyzing the cosine similarity between words, we identified certain limitations in the pre-trained BanglaBERT models, particularly in their ability to distinguish between closely related communal and non-communal terms. To further interpret the model's decisions, we applied LIME, which helped to uncover specific areas where the model struggled in understanding context, contributing to errors in classification. These findings highlight the promise of NLP and interpretability tools in reducing online communal violence. Our work contributes to the growing body of research in communal violence detection and offers a foundation for future studies aiming to refine these techniques for better accuracy and societal impact.
CLMar 29, 2024
IPA Transcription of Bengali TextsKanij Fatema, Fazle Dawood Haider, Nirzona Ferdousi Turpa et al.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) serves to systematize phonemes in language, enabling precise textual representation of pronunciation. In Bengali phonology and phonetics, ongoing scholarly deliberations persist concerning the IPA standard and core Bengali phonemes. This work examines prior research, identifies current and potential issues, and suggests a framework for a Bengali IPA standard, facilitating linguistic analysis and NLP resource creation and downstream technology development. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Bengali IPA transcription and introduce a novel IPA transcription framework incorporating a novel dataset with DL-based benchmarks.
ASMay 15, 2023
OOD-Speech: A Large Bengali Speech Recognition Dataset for Out-of-Distribution BenchmarkingFazle 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.
CLMay 11, 2023
Unicode Normalization and Grapheme Parsing of Indic LanguagesNazmuddoha 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.
SIJul 11, 2019
Predicting engagement in online social networks: Challenges and opportunitiesFarig Sadeque, Steven Bethard
Since the introduction of social media, user participation or engagement has received little research attention. In this survey article, we establish the notion of participation in social media and main challenges that researchers may face while exploring this phenomenon. We surveyed a handful of research articles that had been done in this area, and tried to extract, analyze and summarize the techniques performed by the researchers. We classified these works based on our task definitions, and explored the machine learning models that have been used for any kind of participation prediction. We also explored the vast amount of features that have been proven useful, and classified them into categories for better understanding and ease of re-implementation. We have found that the success of a technique mostly depends on the type of the network that has been researched on, and there is no universal machine learning algorithm or feature sets that works reasonably well in all types of social media. There is a lack of attempts in implementing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques like neural networks, and the possibility of transfer learning and domain adaptation has not been explored.