Daily Papers

Handwritten digit or numeral recognition is one of the classical issues in the area of pattern recognition and has seen tremendous advancement because of the recent wide availability of computing resources. Plentiful works have already done on English, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese handwritten script. Some work on Bangla also have been done but there is space for development. From that angle, in this paper, an architecture has been implemented which achieved the validation accuracy of 99.44% on BHAND dataset and outperforms Alexnet and Inception V3 architecture. Beside digit recognition, digit generation is another field which has recently caught the attention of the researchers though not many works have been done in this field especially on Bangla. In this paper, a Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Network or SGAN has been applied to generate Bangla handwritten numerals and it successfully generated Bangla digits.

In this paper, we introduce Bangla-Bayanno, an open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) Dataset in Bangla, a widely used, low-resource language in multimodal AI research. The majority of existing datasets are either manually annotated with an emphasis on a specific domain, query type, or answer type or are constrained by niche answer formats. In order to mitigate human-induced errors and guarantee lucidity, we implemented a multilingual LLM-assisted translation refinement pipeline. This dataset overcomes the issues of low-quality translations from multilingual sources. The dataset comprises 52,650 question-answer pairs across 4750+ images. Questions are classified into three distinct answer types: nominal (short descriptive), quantitative (numeric), and polar (yes/no). Bangla-Bayanno provides the most comprehensive open-source, high-quality VQA benchmark in Bangla, aiming to advance research in low-resource multimodal learning and facilitate the development of more inclusive AI systems.

Bangla (or "Bengali") is a language spoken by approximately 240 million native speakers and around 300 million people worldwide. Despite being the 5th largest spoken language in the world, Bangla is still a "low-resource" language, and existing pretrained language models often struggle to perform well on Bangla Language Processing (BLP) tasks. This work addresses this gap by introducing BongLLaMA (i.e., Bangla-LLaMA), an open-source large language model fine-tuned exclusively on large Bangla corpora and instruction-tuning datasets. We present our methodology, data augmentation techniques, fine-tuning details, and comprehensive benchmarking results showcasing the utility of BongLLaMA on BLP tasks. We believe BongLLaMA will serve as the new standard baseline for Bangla Language Models and, thus, facilitate future benchmarking studies focused on this widely-spoken yet "low-resource" language. All BongLLaMA models are available for public use at https://huggingface.co/BanglaLLM.

Visual Question Answer (VQA) poses the problem of answering a natural language question about a visual context. Bangla, despite being a widely spoken language, is considered low-resource in the realm of VQA due to the lack of proper benchmarks, challenging models known to be performant in other languages. Furthermore, existing Bangla VQA datasets offer little regional relevance and are largely adapted from their foreign counterparts. To address these challenges, we introduce a large-scale Bangla VQA dataset, ChitroJera, totaling over 15k samples from diverse and locally relevant data sources. We assess the performance of text encoders, image encoders, multimodal models, and our novel dual-encoder models. The experiments reveal that the pre-trained dual-encoders outperform other models of their scale. We also evaluate the performance of current large vision language models (LVLMs) using prompt-based techniques, achieving the overall best performance. Given the underdeveloped state of existing datasets, we envision ChitroJera expanding the scope of Vision-Language tasks in Bangla.

Bangla Handwritten Digit recognition is a significant step forward in the development of Bangla OCR. However, intricate shape, structural likeness and distinctive composition style of Bangla digits makes it relatively challenging to distinguish. Thus, in this paper, we benchmarked four rigorous classifiers to recognize Bangla Handwritten Digit: K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) based on three handcrafted feature extraction techniques: Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Local Binary Pattern (LBP), and Gabor filter on four publicly available Bangla handwriting digits datasets: NumtaDB, CMARTdb, Ekush and BDRW. Here, handcrafted feature extraction methods are used to extract features from the dataset image, which are then utilized to train machine learning classifiers to identify Bangla handwritten digits. We further fine-tuned the hyperparameters of the classification algorithms in order to acquire the finest Bangla handwritten digits recognition performance from these algorithms, and among all the models we employed, the HOG features combined with SVM model (HOG+SVM) attained the best performance metrics across all datasets. The recognition accuracy of the HOG+SVM method on the NumtaDB, CMARTdb, Ekush and BDRW datasets reached 93.32%, 98.08%, 95.68% and 89.68%, respectively as well as we compared the model performance with recent state-of-art methods.

Bangla -- ranked as the 6th most widely spoken language across the world (https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200), with 230 million native speakers -- is still considered as a low-resource language in the natural language processing (NLP) community. With three decades of research, Bangla NLP (BNLP) is still lagging behind mainly due to the scarcity of resources and the challenges that come with it. There is sparse work in different areas of BNLP; however, a thorough survey reporting previous work and recent advances is yet to be done. In this study, we first provide a review of Bangla NLP tasks, resources, and tools available to the research community; we benchmark datasets collected from various platforms for nine NLP tasks using current state-of-the-art algorithms (i.e., transformer-based models). We provide comparative results for the studied NLP tasks by comparing monolingual vs. multilingual models of varying sizes. We report our results using both individual and consolidated datasets and provide data splits for future research. We reviewed a total of 108 papers and conducted 175 sets of experiments. Our results show promising performance using transformer-based models while highlighting the trade-off with computational costs. We hope that such a comprehensive survey will motivate the community to build on and further advance the research on Bangla NLP.

Developing accurate biomedical Question Answering (QA) systems in low-resource languages remains a major challenge, limiting equitable access to reliable medical knowledge. This paper introduces BanglaMedQA and BanglaMMedBench, the first large-scale Bangla biomedical Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) datasets designed to evaluate reasoning and retrieval in medical artificial intelligence (AI). The study applies and benchmarks several Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies, including Traditional, Zero-Shot Fallback, Agentic, Iterative Feedback, and Aggregate RAG, combining textbook-based and web retrieval with generative reasoning to improve factual accuracy. A key novelty lies in integrating a Bangla medical textbook corpus through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and implementing an Agentic RAG pipeline that dynamically selects between retrieval and reasoning strategies. Experimental results show that the Agentic RAG achieved the highest accuracy 89.54% with openai/gpt-oss-120b, outperforming other configurations and demonstrating superior rationale quality. These findings highlight the potential of RAG-based methods to enhance the reliability and accessibility of Bangla medical QA, establishing a foundation for future research in multilingual medical artificial intelligence.

Large language models work well for technical problem solving in English but perform poorly when the same questions are asked in Bangla. A simple solution would be to translate Bangla questions into English first and then use these models. However, existing Bangla-English translation systems struggle with technical terms. They often mistranslate specialized vocabulary, which changes the meaning of the problem and leads to wrong answers. We present BanglaSTEM, a dataset of 5,000 carefully selected Bangla-English sentence pairs from STEM fields including computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. We generated over 12,000 translations using language models and then used human evaluators to select the highest quality pairs that preserve technical terminology correctly. We train a T5-based translation model on BanglaSTEM and test it on two tasks: generating code and solving math problems. Our results show significant improvements in translation accuracy for technical content, making it easier for Bangla speakers to use English-focused language models effectively. Both the BanglaSTEM dataset and the trained translation model are publicly released at https://huggingface.co/reyazul/BanglaSTEM-T5.

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.

The analysis of consumer sentiment, as expressed through reviews, can provide a wealth of insight regarding the quality of a product. While the study of sentiment analysis has been widely explored in many popular languages, relatively less attention has been given to the Bangla language, mostly due to a lack of relevant data and cross-domain adaptability. To address this limitation, we present BanglaBook, a large-scale dataset of Bangla book reviews consisting of 158,065 samples classified into three broad categories: positive, negative, and neutral. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of machine learning models to establish baselines including SVM, LSTM, and Bangla-BERT. Our findings demonstrate a substantial performance advantage of pre-trained models over models that rely on manually crafted features, emphasizing the necessity for additional training resources in this domain. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth error analysis by examining sentiment unigrams, which may provide insight into common classification errors in under-resourced languages like Bangla. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mohsinulkabir14/BanglaBook.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various natural language processing tasks. However, most LLM models use traditional tokenizers like BPE and SentencePiece, which fail to capture the finer nuances of a morphologically rich language like Bangla (Bengali). In this work, we introduce BanglaByT5, the first byte-level encoder-decoder model explicitly tailored for Bangla. Built upon a small variant of Googles ByT5 architecture, BanglaByT5 is pre-trained on a 14GB curated corpus combining high-quality literary and newspaper articles. Through zeroshot and supervised evaluations across generative and classification tasks, BanglaByT5 demonstrates competitive performance, surpassing several multilingual and larger models. Our findings highlight the efficacy of byte-level modelling for morphologically rich languages and highlight BanglaByT5 potential as a lightweight yet powerful tool for Bangla NLP, particularly in both resource-constrained and scalable environments.

Bengali is the seventh most spoken language on earth, yet considered a low-resource language in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Question answering over unstructured text is a challenging NLP task as it requires understanding both question and passage. Very few researchers attempted to perform question answering over Bengali (natively pronounced as Bangla) text. Typically, existing approaches construct the dataset by directly translating them from English to Bengali, which produces noisy and improper sentence structures. Furthermore, they lack topics and terminologies related to the Bengali language and people. This paper introduces BanglaQuAD, a Bengali question answering dataset, containing 30,808 question-answer pairs constructed from Bengali Wikipedia articles by native speakers. Additionally, we propose an annotation tool that facilitates question-answering dataset construction on a local machine. A qualitative analysis demonstrates the quality of our proposed dataset.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have proven essential in information processing and reasoning applications because they link related entities and give context-rich information, supporting efficient information retrieval and knowledge discovery; presenting information flow in a very effective manner. Despite being widely used globally, Bangla is relatively underrepresented in KGs due to a lack of comprehensive datasets, encoders, NER (named entity recognition) models, POS (part-of-speech) taggers, and lemmatizers, hindering efficient information processing and reasoning applications in the language. Addressing the KG scarcity in Bengali, we propose BanglaAutoKG, a pioneering framework that is able to automatically construct Bengali KGs from any Bangla text. We utilize multilingual LLMs to understand various languages and correlate entities and relations universally. By employing a translation dictionary to identify English equivalents and extracting word features from pre-trained BERT models, we construct the foundational KG. To reduce noise and align word embeddings with our goal, we employ graph-based polynomial filters. Lastly, we implement a GNN-based semantic filter, which elevates contextual understanding and trims unnecessary edges, culminating in the formation of the definitive KG. Empirical findings and case studies demonstrate the universal effectiveness of our model, capable of autonomously constructing semantically enriched KGs from any text.

In this work, we present BanglaParaphrase, a high-quality synthetic Bangla Paraphrase dataset curated by a novel filtering pipeline. We aim to take a step towards alleviating the low resource status of the Bangla language in the NLP domain through the introduction of BanglaParaphrase, which ensures quality by preserving both semantics and diversity, making it particularly useful to enhance other Bangla datasets. We show a detailed comparative analysis between our dataset and models trained on it with other existing works to establish the viability of our synthetic paraphrase data generation pipeline. We are making the dataset and models publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglaparaphrase to further the state of Bangla NLP.

Being one of the most widely spoken language in the world, the use of Bangla has been increasing in the world of social media as well. Sarcasm is a positive statement or remark with an underlying negative motivation that is extensively employed in today's social media platforms. There has been a significant improvement in sarcasm detection in English over the previous many years, however the situation regarding Bangla sarcasm detection remains unchanged. As a result, it is still difficult to identify sarcasm in bangla, and a lack of high-quality data is a major contributing factor. This article proposes BanglaSarc, a dataset constructed specifically for bangla textual data sarcasm detection. This dataset contains of 5112 comments/status and contents collected from various online social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, along with a few online blogs. Due to the limited amount of data collection of categorized comments in Bengali, this dataset will aid in the of study identifying sarcasm, recognizing people's emotion, detecting various types of Bengali expressions, and other domains. The dataset is publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sakibapon/banglasarc.

This work presents BanglaNLG, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating natural language generation (NLG) models in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language. We aggregate six challenging conditional text generation tasks under the BanglaNLG benchmark, introducing a new dataset on dialogue generation in the process. Furthermore, using a clean corpus of 27.5 GB of Bangla data, we pretrain BanglaT5, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer language model for Bangla. BanglaT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in all of these tasks, outperforming several multilingual models by up to 9% absolute gain and 32% relative gain. We are making the new dialogue dataset and the BanglaT5 model publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/BanglaNLG in the hope of advancing future research on Bangla NLG.

In this work, we introduce BanglaBERT, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model pretrained in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the NLP literature. To pretrain BanglaBERT, we collect 27.5 GB of Bangla pretraining data (dubbed `Bangla2B+') by crawling 110 popular Bangla sites. We introduce two downstream task datasets on natural language inference and question answering and benchmark on four diverse NLU tasks covering text classification, sequence labeling, and span prediction. In the process, we bring them under the first-ever Bangla Language Understanding Benchmark (BLUB). BanglaBERT achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming multilingual and monolingual models. We are making the models, datasets, and a leaderboard publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglabert to advance Bangla NLP.

Bangladesh's low-income population faces major barriers to affordable legal advice due to complex legal language, procedural opacity, and high costs. Existing AI legal assistants lack Bengali-language support and jurisdiction-specific adaptation, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we developed Mina, a multilingual LLM-based legal assistant tailored for the Bangladeshi context. It employs multilingual embeddings and a RAG-based chain-of-tools framework for retrieval, reasoning, translation, and document generation, delivering context-aware legal drafts, citations, and plain-language explanations via an interactive chat interface. Evaluated by law faculty from leading Bangladeshi universities across all stages of the 2022 and 2023 Bangladesh Bar Council Exams, Mina scored 75-80% in Preliminary MCQs, Written, and simulated Viva Voce exams, matching or surpassing average human performance and demonstrating clarity, contextual understanding, and sound legal reasoning. These results confirm its potential as a low-cost, multilingual AI assistant that automates key legal tasks and scales access to justice, offering a real-world case study on building domain-specific, low-resource systems and addressing challenges of multilingual adaptation, efficiency, and sustainable public-service AI deployment.

Real-time speech assistants are becoming increasingly popular for ensuring improved accessibility to information. Bengali, being a low-resource language with a high regional dialectal diversity, has seen limited progress in developing such systems. Existing systems are not optimized for real-time use and focus only on standard Bengali. In this work, we present BanglaTalk, the first real-time speech assistance system for Bengali regional dialects. BanglaTalk follows the client-server architecture and uses the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) to ensure low-latency communication. To address dialectal variation, we introduce a dialect-aware ASR system, BRDialect, developed by fine-tuning the IndicWav2Vec model in ten Bengali regional dialects. It outperforms the baseline ASR models by 12.41-33.98% on the RegSpeech12 dataset. Furthermore, BanglaTalk can operate at a low bandwidth of 24 kbps while maintaining an average end-to-end delay of 4.9 seconds. Low bandwidth usage and minimal end-to-end delay make the system both cost-effective and interactive for real-time use cases, enabling inclusive and accessible speech technology for the diverse community of Bengali speakers.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) converts the human voice into readily understandable and categorized text or words. Although Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, there have been very few studies on Bengali ASR, particularly on Bangladeshi-accented Bengali. In this study, audio recordings of spoken digits (0-9) from university students were used to create a Bengali speech digits dataset that may be employed to train artificial neural networks for voice-based digital input systems. This paper also compares the Bengali digit recognition accuracy of several Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using spectrograms and shows that a test accuracy of 98.23% is achievable using parameter-efficient models such as SqueezeNet on our dataset.

The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and multimodal models.

While Bangla is considered a language with limited resources, sentiment analysis has been a subject of extensive research in the literature. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of exploration into sentiment analysis specifically in the realm of noisy Bangla texts. In this paper, we introduce a dataset (NC-SentNoB) that we annotated manually to identify ten different types of noise found in a pre-existing sentiment analysis dataset comprising of around 15K noisy Bangla texts. At first, given an input noisy text, we identify the noise type, addressing this as a multi-label classification task. Then, we introduce baseline noise reduction methods to alleviate noise prior to conducting sentiment analysis. Finally, we assess the performance of fine-tuned sentiment analysis models with both noisy and noise-reduced texts to make comparisons. The experimental findings indicate that the noise reduction methods utilized are not satisfactory, highlighting the need for more suitable noise reduction methods in future research endeavors. We have made the implementation and dataset presented in this paper publicly available at https://github.com/ktoufiquee/A-Comparative-Analysis-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods-in-Sentiment-Analysis-on-Noisy-Bangla-Texts

Training models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) requires substantial computational resources and time, posing significant challenges, especially for NLP development in Bangla, where access to high-end hardware is often limited. In this work, we explore automatic mixed precision (AMP) training as a means to improve computational efficiency without sacrificing model performance. By leveraging a dynamic mix of 16-bit and 32-bit floating-point computations, AMP lowers GPU memory requirements and speeds up training without degrading model performance. We evaluate AMP across four standard Bangla NLP tasks, namely sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, error classification, and question answering, using four transformer-based models: BanglaBERT, BanglishBERT, XLM-R, and mBERT. Our results demonstrate that AMP accelerates training by 44.5% and reduces memory consumption by 17.6%, while maintaining F-1 score within 99.7% of the full-precision baselines. This empirical study highlights AMP's potential to democratize access to state-of-the-art NLP capabilities in hardware-constrained settings by lowering computational barriers.

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) involves the automatic identification and classification of sign gestures from images or video, converting them into text or speech to improve accessibility for the hearing-impaired community. In Bangladesh, Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) serves as the primary mode of communication for many individuals with hearing impairments. This study fine-tunes state-of-the-art video transformer architectures -- VideoMAE, ViViT, and TimeSformer -- on BdSLW60 (arXiv:2402.08635), a small-scale BdSL dataset with 60 frequent signs. We standardized the videos to 30 FPS, resulting in 9,307 user trial clips. To evaluate scalability and robustness, the models were also fine-tuned on BdSLW401 (arXiv:2503.02360), a large-scale dataset with 401 sign classes. Additionally, we benchmark performance against public datasets, including LSA64 and WLASL. Data augmentation techniques such as random cropping, horizontal flipping, and short-side scaling were applied to improve model robustness. To ensure balanced evaluation across folds during model selection, we employed 10-fold stratified cross-validation on the training set, while signer-independent evaluation was carried out using held-out test data from unseen users U4 and U8. Results show that video transformer models significantly outperform traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches. Performance is influenced by factors such as dataset size, video quality, frame distribution, frame rate, and model architecture. Among the models, the VideoMAE variant (MCG-NJU/videomae-base-finetuned-kinetics) achieved the highest accuracies of 95.5% on the frame rate corrected BdSLW60 dataset and 81.04% on the front-facing signs of BdSLW401 -- demonstrating strong potential for scalable and accurate BdSL recognition.

Texting stands out as the most prominent form of communication worldwide. Individual spend significant amount of time writing whole texts to send emails or write something on social media, which is time consuming in this modern era. Word prediction and sentence completion will be suitable and appropriate in the Bangla language to make textual information easier and more convenient. This paper expands the scope of Bangla language processing by introducing a Bi-LSTM model that effectively handles Bangla next-word prediction and Bangla sentence generation, demonstrating its versatility and potential impact. We proposed a new Bi-LSTM model to predict a following word and complete a sentence. We constructed a corpus dataset from various news portals, including bdnews24, BBC News Bangla, and Prothom Alo. The proposed approach achieved superior results in word prediction, reaching 99\% accuracy for both 4-gram and 5-gram word predictions. Moreover, it demonstrated significant improvement over existing methods, achieving 35\%, 75\%, and 95\% accuracy for uni-gram, bi-gram, and tri-gram word prediction, respectively

This study presents a large multi-modal Bangla YouTube clickbait dataset consisting of 253,070 data points collected through an automated process using the YouTube API and Python web automation frameworks. The dataset contains 18 diverse features categorized into metadata, primary content, engagement statistics, and labels for individual videos from 58 Bangla YouTube channels. A rigorous preprocessing step has been applied to denoise, deduplicate, and remove bias from the features, ensuring unbiased and reliable analysis. As the largest and most robust clickbait corpus in Bangla to date, this dataset provides significant value for natural language processing and data science researchers seeking to advance modeling of clickbait phenomena in low-resource languages. Its multi-modal nature allows for comprehensive analyses of clickbait across content, user interactions, and linguistic dimensions to develop more sophisticated detection methods with cross-linguistic applications.

A positive phrase or a sentence with an underlying negative motive is usually defined as sarcasm that is widely used in today's social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. In recent times active users in social media platforms are increasing dramatically which raises the need for an automated NLP-based system that can be utilized in various tasks such as determining market demand, sentiment analysis, threat detection, etc. However, since sarcasm usually implies the opposite meaning and its detection is frequently a challenging issue, data meaning extraction through an NLP-based model becomes more complicated. As a result, there has been a lot of study on sarcasm detection in English over the past several years, and there's been a noticeable improvement and yet sarcasm detection in the Bangla language's state remains the same. In this article, we present a BERT-based system that can achieve 99.60\% while the utilized traditional machine learning algorithms are only capable of achieving 89.93\%. Additionally, we have employed Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations that introduce explainability to our system. Moreover, we have utilized a newly collected bangla sarcasm dataset, BanglaSarc that was constructed specifically for the evaluation of this study. This dataset consists of fresh records of sarcastic and non-sarcastic comments, the majority of which are acquired from Facebook and YouTube comment sections.

Purpose: Bangladesh's legal system struggles with major challenges like delays, complexity, high costs, and millions of unresolved cases, which deter many from pursuing legal action due to lack of knowledge or financial constraints. This research seeks to develop a specialized Large Language Model (LLM) to assist in the Bangladeshi legal system. Methods: We created UKIL-DB-EN, an English corpus of Bangladeshi legal documents, by collecting and scraping data on various legal acts. We fine-tuned the GPT-2 model on this dataset to develop GPT2-UKIL-EN, an LLM focused on providing legal assistance in English. Results: The model was rigorously evaluated using semantic assessments, including case studies supported by expert opinions. The evaluation provided promising results, demonstrating the potential for the model to assist in legal matters within Bangladesh. Conclusion: Our work represents the first structured effort toward building an AI-based legal assistant for Bangladesh. While the results are encouraging, further refinements are necessary to improve the model's accuracy, credibility, and safety. This is a significant step toward creating a legal AI capable of serving the needs of a population of 180 million.

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).

This work introduces systematic approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs) to address Bangla AI mathematical challenges. Through the assessment of diverse LLM configurations, fine-tuning with specific datasets, and the implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we enhanced the model's reasoning precision in a multilingual setting. Crucial discoveries indicate that customized prompting, dataset augmentation, and iterative reasoning improve the model's efficiency regarding Olympiad-level mathematical challenges.

Detecting media bias is crucial, specifically in the South Asian region. Despite this, annotated datasets and computational studies for Bangla political bias research remain scarce. Crucially because, political stance detection in Bangla news requires understanding of linguistic cues, cultural context, subtle biases, rhetorical strategies, code-switching, implicit sentiment, and socio-political background. To address this, we introduce the first benchmark dataset of 200 politically significant and highly debated Bangla news articles, labeled for government-leaning, government-critique, and neutral stances, alongside diagnostic analyses for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Our comprehensive evaluation of 28 proprietary and open-source LLMs shows strong performance in detecting government-critique content (F1 up to 0.83) but substantial difficulty with neutral articles (F1 as low as 0.00). Models also tend to over-predict government-leaning stances, often misinterpreting ambiguous narratives. This dataset and its associated diagnostics provide a foundation for advancing stance detection in Bangla media research and offer insights for improving LLM performance in low-resource languages.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains heavily skewed towards English and a few other high-resource languages. This linguistic disparity is particularly evident for Bangla - the 5th most spoken language. A few initiatives attempted to create open-source Bangla LLMs with performance still behind high-resource languages and limited reproducibility. To address this gap, we introduce TigerLLM - a family of Bangla LLMs. Our results demonstrate that these models surpass all open-source alternatives and also outperform larger proprietary models like GPT3.5 across standard benchmarks, establishing TigerLLM as the new baseline for future Bangla language modeling.

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

In the field of audio and speech analysis, the ability to identify emotions from acoustic signals is essential. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and behavioural analysis are only a few of the many areas where the capacity to distinguish emotions from speech signals has an extensive range of applications. Here, we are introducing BanSpEmo, a corpus of emotional speech that only consists of audio recordings and has been created specifically for the Bangla language. This corpus contains 792 audio recordings over a duration of more than 1 hour and 23 minutes. 22 native speakers took part in the recording of two sets of sentences that represent the six desired emotions. The data set consists of 12 Bangla sentences which are uttered in 6 emotions as Disgust, Happy, Sad, Surprised, Anger, and Fear. This corpus is not also gender balanced. Ten individuals who either have experience in related field or have acting experience took part in the assessment of this corpus. It has a balanced number of audio recordings in each emotion class. BanSpEmo can be considered as a useful resource to promote emotion and speech recognition research and related applications in the Bangla language. The dataset can be found here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/rdwn4bs5ky and might be employed for academic research.

Code-mixing is a well-studied linguistic phenomenon when two or more languages are mixed in text or speech. Several datasets have been build with the goal of training computational models for code-mixing. Although it is very common to observe code-mixing with multiple languages, most datasets available contain code-mixed between only two languages. In this paper, we introduce SentMix-3L, a novel dataset for sentiment analysis containing code-mixed data between three languages Bangla, English, and Hindi. We carry out a comprehensive evaluation using SentMix-3L. We show that zero-shot prompting with GPT-3.5 outperforms all transformer-based models on SentMix-3L.

This study introduces SentiGOLD, a Bangla multi-domain sentiment analysis dataset. Comprising 70,000 samples, it was created from diverse sources and annotated by a gender-balanced team of linguists. SentiGOLD adheres to established linguistic conventions agreed upon by the Government of Bangladesh and a Bangla linguistics committee. Unlike English and other languages, Bangla lacks standard sentiment analysis datasets due to the absence of a national linguistics framework. The dataset incorporates data from online video comments, social media posts, blogs, news, and other sources while maintaining domain and class distribution rigorously. It spans 30 domains (e.g., politics, entertainment, sports) and includes 5 sentiment classes (strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, and strongly positive). The annotation scheme, approved by the national linguistics committee, ensures a robust Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) with a Fleiss' kappa score of 0.88. Intra- and cross-dataset evaluation protocols are applied to establish a standard classification system. Cross-dataset evaluation on the noisy SentNoB dataset presents a challenging test scenario. Additionally, zero-shot experiments demonstrate the generalizability of SentiGOLD. The top model achieves a macro f1 score of 0.62 (intra-dataset) across 5 classes, setting a benchmark, and 0.61 (cross-dataset from SentNoB) across 3 classes, comparable to the state-of-the-art. Fine-tuned sentiment analysis model can be accessed at https://sentiment.bangla.gov.bd.

Characters are the smallest unit of text that can extract stylometric signals to determine the author of a text. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of character-level signals in Authorship Attribution of Bangla Literature and show that the results are promising but improvable. The time and memory efficiency of the proposed model is much higher than the word level counterparts but accuracy is 2-5% less than the best performing word-level models. Comparison of various word-based models is performed and shown that the proposed model performs increasingly better with larger datasets. We also analyze the effect of pre-training character embedding of diverse Bangla character set in authorship attribution. It is seen that the performance is improved by up to 10% on pre-training. We used 2 datasets from 6 to 14 authors, balancing them before training and compare the results.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts, especially in low-resource languages like Bangla, contain a critical ambiguity: word-word repetitions can be either Repetition Disfluency (unintentional ASR error/hesitation) or Morphological Reduplication (a deliberate grammatical construct). Standard disfluency correction fails by erroneously deleting valid linguistic information. To solve this, we introduce the first publicly available, 20,000-row Bangla corpus, manually annotated to explicitly distinguish between these two phenomena in noisy ASR transcripts. We benchmark this novel resource using two paradigms: state-of-the-art multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) and task-specific fine-tuning of encoder models. LLMs achieve competitive performance (up to 82.68\% accuracy) with few-shot prompting. However, fine-tuning proves superior, with the language-specific BanglaBERT model achieving the highest accuracy of 84.78\% and an F1 score of 0.677. This establishes a strong, linguistically-informed baseline and provides essential data for developing sophisticated, semantic-preserving text normalization systems for Bangla.

In recent years, neural models trained on large multilingual text and speech datasets have shown great potential for supporting low-resource languages. This study investigates the performances of two state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, OpenAI's Whisper (Small & Large-V2) and Facebook's Wav2Vec-BERT on Bangla, a low-resource language. We have conducted experiments using two publicly available datasets: Mozilla Common Voice-17 and OpenSLR to evaluate model performances. Through systematic fine-tuning and hyperparameter optimization, including learning rate, epochs, and model checkpoint selection, we have compared the models based on Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), Training Time, and Computational Efficiency. The Wav2Vec-BERT model outperformed Whisper across all key evaluation metrics, demonstrated superior performance while requiring fewer computational resources, and offered valuable insights to develop robust speech recognition systems in low-resource linguistic settings.

Sign language recognition (SLR) for low-resource languages like Bangla suffers from signer variability, viewpoint variations, and limited annotated datasets. In this paper, we present BdSLW401, a large-scale, multi-view, word-level Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) dataset with 401 signs and 102,176 video samples from 18 signers in front and lateral views. To improve transformer-based SLR, we introduce Relative Quantization Encoding (RQE), a structured embedding approach anchoring landmarks to physiological reference points and quantize motion trajectories. RQE improves attention allocation by decreasing spatial variability, resulting in 44.3% WER reduction in WLASL100, 21.0% in SignBD-200, and significant gains in BdSLW60 and SignBD-90. However, fixed quantization becomes insufficient on large-scale datasets (e.g., WLASL2000), indicating the need for adaptive encoding strategies. Further, RQE-SF, an extended variant that stabilizes shoulder landmarks, achieves improvements in pose consistency at the cost of small trade-offs in lateral view recognition. The attention graphs prove that RQE improves model interpretability by focusing on the major articulatory features (fingers, wrists) and the more distinctive frames instead of global pose changes. Introducing BdSLW401 and demonstrating the effectiveness of RQE-enhanced structured embeddings, this work advances transformer-based SLR for low-resource languages and sets a benchmark for future research in this area.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking (3) two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.

Pretrained language models inherently exhibit various social biases, prompting a crucial examination of their social impact across various linguistic contexts due to their widespread usage. Previous studies have provided numerous methods for intrinsic bias measurements, predominantly focused on high-resource languages. In this work, we aim to extend these investigations to Bangla, a low-resource language. Specifically, in this study, we (1) create a dataset for intrinsic gender bias measurement in Bangla, (2) discuss necessary adaptations to apply existing bias measurement methods for Bangla, and (3) examine the impact of context length variation on bias measurement, a factor that has been overlooked in previous studies. Through our experiments, we demonstrate a clear dependency of bias metrics on context length, highlighting the need for nuanced considerations in Bangla bias analysis. We consider our work as a stepping stone for bias measurement in the Bangla Language and make all of our resources publicly available to support future research.

We introduce a new dataset for offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) from images of Bangla scripts comprising words, lines, and document-level annotations. The BN-HTRd dataset is based on the BBC Bangla News corpus, meant to act as ground truth texts. These texts were subsequently used to generate the annotations that were filled out by people with their handwriting. Our dataset includes 788 images of handwritten pages produced by approximately 150 different writers. It can be adopted as a basis for various handwriting classification tasks such as end-to-end document recognition, word-spotting, word or line segmentation, and so on. We also propose a scheme to segment Bangla handwritten document images into corresponding lines in an unsupervised manner. Our line segmentation approach takes care of the variability involved in different writing styles, accurately segmenting complex handwritten text lines of curvilinear nature. Along with a bunch of pre-processing and morphological operations, both Hough line and circle transforms were employed to distinguish different linear components. In order to arrange those components into their corresponding lines, we followed an unsupervised clustering approach. The average success rate of our segmentation technique is 81.57% in terms of FM metrics (similar to F-measure) with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.547.

In the recent years, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the field of Computer Vision, with the forthcoming of the transformer architecture. Detection Transformers has become a state of the art solution to object detection and is a potential candidate for Road Object Detection in Autonomous Vehicles. Despite the abundance of object detection schemes, real-time DETR models are shown to perform significantly better on inference times, with minimal loss of accuracy and performance. In our work, we used Real-Time DETR (RTDETR) object detection on the BadODD Road Object Detection dataset based in Bangladesh, and performed necessary experimentation and testing. Our results gave a mAP50 score of 0.41518 in the public 60% test set, and 0.28194 in the private 40% test set.

This dataset represents almost all the harmful diseases for rice in Bangladesh. This dataset consists of 1106 image of five harmful diseases called Brown Spot, Leaf Scaled, Rice Blast, Rice Turngo, Steath Blight in two different background variation named field background picture and white background picture. Two different background variation helps the dataset to perform more accurately so that the user can use this data for field use as well as white background for decision making. The data is collected from rice field of Dhaka Division. This dataset can use for rice leaf diseases classification, diseases detection using Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for different rice leaf disease.

Initial work has been done to address fake news detection and misrepresentation of news in the Bengali language. However, no work in Bengali yet addresses the identification of specific claims in social media news that falsely manipulates a related news article. At this point, this problem has been tackled in English and a few other languages, but not in the Bengali language. In this paper, we curate a dataset of social media content labeled with information manipulation relative to reference articles, called BanMANI. The dataset collection method we describe works around the limitations of the available NLP tools in Bangla. We expect these techniques will carry over to building similar datasets in other low-resource languages. BanMANI forms the basis both for evaluating the capabilities of existing NLP systems and for training or fine-tuning new models specifically on this task. In our analysis, we find that this task challenges current LLMs both under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.

Code-mixing is a well-studied linguistic phenomenon when two or more languages are mixed in text or speech. Several works have been conducted on building datasets and performing downstream NLP tasks on code-mixed data. Although it is not uncommon to observe code-mixing of three or more languages, most available datasets in this domain contain code-mixed data from only two languages. In this paper, we introduce OffMix-3L, a novel offensive language identification dataset containing code-mixed data from three different languages. We experiment with several models on this dataset and observe that BanglishBERT outperforms other transformer-based models and GPT-3.5.

As voice assistants cement their place in our technologically advanced society, there remains a need to cater to the diverse linguistic landscape, including colloquial forms of low-resource languages. Our study introduces the first-ever comprehensive dataset for intent detection and slot filling in formal Bangla, colloquial Bangla, and Sylheti languages, totaling 984 samples across 10 unique intents. Our analysis reveals the robustness of large language models for tackling downstream tasks with inadequate data. The GPT-3.5 model achieves an impressive F1 score of 0.94 in intent detection and 0.51 in slot filling for colloquial Bangla.

One of the most popular downstream tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing is text classification. Text classification tasks have become more daunting when the texts are code-mixed. Though they are not exposed to such text during pre-training, different BERT models have demonstrated success in tackling Code-Mixed NLP challenges. Again, in order to enhance their performance, Code-Mixed NLP models have depended on combining synthetic data with real-world data. It is crucial to understand how the BERT models' performance is impacted when they are pretrained using corresponding code-mixed languages. In this paper, we introduce Tri-Distil-BERT, a multilingual model pre-trained on Bangla, English, and Hindi, and Mixed-Distil-BERT, a model fine-tuned on code-mixed data. Both models are evaluated across multiple NLP tasks and demonstrate competitive performance against larger models like mBERT and XLM-R. Our two-tiered pre-training approach offers efficient alternatives for multilingual and code-mixed language understanding, contributing to advancements in the field.

Word-level handwritten optical character recognition (OCR) remains a challenge for morphologically rich languages like Bangla. The complexity arises from the existence of a large number of alphabets, the presence of several diacritic forms, and the appearance of complex conjuncts. The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that some graphemes occur infrequently but remain indispensable, so addressing the class imbalance is required for satisfactory results. This paper addresses this issue by introducing two knowledge distillation methods: Leveraging Isolated Letter Accumulations By Ordering Teacher Insights (LILA-BOTI) and Super Teacher LILA-BOTI. In both cases, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) student model is trained with the dark knowledge gained from a printed isolated character recognition teacher model. We conducted inter-dataset testing on BN-HTRd and BanglaWriting as our evaluation protocol, thus setting up a challenging problem where the results would better reflect the performance on unseen data. Our evaluations achieved up to a 3.5% increase in the F1-Macro score for the minor classes and up to 4.5% increase in our overall word recognition rate when compared with the base model (No KD) and conventional KD.

Cyberbullying or Online harassment detection on social media for various major languages is currently being given a good amount of focus by researchers worldwide. Being the seventh most speaking language in the world and increasing usage of online platform among the Bengali speaking people urge to find effective detection technique to handle the online harassment. In this paper, we have proposed binary and multiclass classification model using hybrid neural network for bully expression detection in Bengali language. We have used 44,001 users comments from popular public Facebook pages, which fall into five classes - Non-bully, Sexual, Threat, Troll and Religious. We have examined the performance of our proposed models from different perspective. Our binary classification model gives 87.91% accuracy, whereas introducing ensemble technique after neural network for multiclass classification, we got 85% accuracy.

The research assesses soil salinity in the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh, collecting a total of 162 topsoil samples between March 1 and March 9, 2024, and processing them following the standard operating procedure for soil electrical conductivity (soil/water, 1:5). Electrical conductivity (EC) measurements obtained using a HI-6321 advanced conductivity benchtop meter were analyzed and visualized using bubble density mapping and the Empirical Bayesian Kriging interpolation method. The findings indicate that soil salinity in the study area ranges from 0.05 to 9.09 mS/cm, with the highest levels observed near Debhata and Koyra. A gradient of increasing soil salinity is clearly evident from the northern to southern regions. This dataset provides a critical resource for soil salinity-related research in the region, offering valuable insights to support decision-makers in understanding and mitigating the impacts of soil salinity in Bangladesh's coastal areas.

The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.