Conference Papers (Centre for Research on Bangla Language Processing)

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    Detecting flames and insults in text
    (BRAC University, 2008-12) Mahmud, Altaf; Ahmed, Kazi Zubair; Khan, Mumit
    While the internet has become the leading source of information, it is also become the medium for flames, insults and other forms of abusive language, which add nothing to the quality of information available. A human reader can easily distinguish between what is information and what is a flame or any other form of abuse. It is however much more difficult for a language processor to do this automatically. This paper describes a new approach for an automated system to distinguish between information and personal attacks containing insulting or abusive expressions in a given document. In linguistics, insulting or abusive messages are viewed as an extreme subset of the subjective language because of its extreme nature. We create a set of rules to extract the semantic information of a given sentence from the general semantic structure of that sentence to separate information from abusive language.
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    Text to speech for Bangla language using festival
    (BRAC University, 2007) Alam, Firoj; Nath, Promila Kanti; Khan, Mumit
    In this paper, we present a Text to Speech (TTS) synthesis system for Bangla language using the open-source Festival TTS engine. Festival is a complete TTS synthesis system, with components supporting front-end processing of the input text, language modeling, and speech synthesis using its signal processing module. The Bangla TTS system proposed here, creates the voice data for festival, and additionally extends festival using its embedded scheme scripting interface to incorporate Bangla language support. Festival is a oncatenative TTS system using diphone or other unit selection speech units. Our TTS implementation uses two different kinds of these concatenative methods supported in Festival: unit selection and multisyn unit selection. The function of a Text-to-Speech system is to convert some language text into its spoken equivalent by a series of modules. These modules, constituting the TTS system are described in detail which is very much helpful for future development. Finally, the quality of synthesized speech is assessed in terms of acceptability and intelligibility.
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    Collaborative lexicon development for Bangla
    (BRAC University, 2006) Pavel, Dewan Shahriar Hossain; Sarkar, Asif Iqbal; Shah, Faisal Muhammad; Khan, Mumit
    This paper addresses the issue of building a Bangla lexicon with a collaborative effort through stand alone application and web based interface. The words in the lexicon will be annotated with a combination of tags addressing Parts-of-speech, syntactic, semantic and other grammatical features. Bangla words have been classified into several different parts – of – speech categories including various major word groups and subgroups. This paper aims to provide an integrated user – friendly software interface to the user to annotate a large existing Bangla word set and proposes a mechanism to collaboratively integrate linguists and other interested people into the lexicon build up process. The effort will be a significant progress towards development of a properly annotated lexicon. The outcome of the effort will significantly help in the processes of Morphological Analysis, Automatic grammar Extraction and machine translation for Bangla.
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    A proposed automated extraction procedure of Bangla text for corpus creation in unicode
    (BRAC University, 2006) Pavel, Dewan Shahriar Hossain; Sarkar, Asif Iqbal; Khan, Mumit
    This paper addresses the issue of automated Bangla corpus creation, which will significantly help the processes of lexicon development, morphological analysis, automatic parts of speech detection and automatic grammar extraction and machine translation. The plan is to collect all free Bangla documents on the world wide web and offline documents available and extract all the words in them to make a huge repository of text. This body of text or corpus will be used for several purposes of Bangla language processing after it is converted to Unicode text. The conversion process is also one of the associated and equally important research and development issue. Among several procedures our research focuses on a combination of font and language detection and Unicode conversion of retrieved Bangla text as a solution for automatic Bangla corpus creation and the methodology has been described in the paper.
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    A comprehensive roman (English)-to-Bangla transliteration scheme
    (BRAC University, 2006) Naushad UzZaman,; Zaheen, Arnab; Khan, Mumit
    A transliteration scheme from Roman (English) to Bangla can help increase the use of Bangla in essential and diverse computing areas such as word processing, Internet and mobile communication and information query and retrieval. The Bangla script’s irregular phonetic nature and its large repertoire of consonant clusters (juktakkhors) create a large gap between the pronunciation and the orthography for a given Bangla word. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive Roman (English)-to-Bangla transliteration scheme that is designed to handle the full complexity of the Bangla script. We apply a phonetic encoding scheme to produce intermediate code-strings that facilitate matching pronunciations of input strings and the desired outputs. We also provide graceful degradation to a more conventional direct phonetic mapping in special circumstances. A prototype of our scheme shows significant success in test cases.
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    Acoustic analysis of Bangla consonants
    (BRAC University, 2008) Alam, Firoj; Habib, S. M. Murtoza; Khan, Mumit
    This paper describes the acoustic characteristics of Bangla consonants, obtained by analyzing the recordings of male and female voices. First, the duration of each phoneme was identified by averaging both the male and female voice data; then, formant were measured and formant comparison was made for controversial phonemes, which also served to resolve the controversies in the existing phoneme inventories; and finally, a consonant phoneme inventory was designed.
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    A comprehensive Bangla spelling checker
    (BRAC University, 2006) Naushad UzZaman,; Khan, Mumit
    We present a comprehensive Bangla spelling checker that improves the quality of suggestions for misspelled words. The complex rules for Bangla spelling presents a significant challenge in producing suggestions for a misspelled word when employing the traditional methods; one must take phonetic similarity into account for suggested alternatives to be reasonably accurate. In Bangla there are several algorithms available for spell checking, however, none of these considers the complex orthographic rules of Bangla. As a result, spelling checker application does not perform well. In this paper, we describe the process of checking the spelling of a Bangla document (i.e. detecting misspelled words, generating suggestions for misspelled word, and ranking the suggestions), compare the methodologies with existing solutions available in the literature, and then propose solutions for each step. Finally, we conclude by showing the performance and evaluation of our proposed solution.
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    Segmentation free Bangla OCR using HMM: Training and recognition
    (BRAC University, 2007) Hasnat, Md. Abul; Habib, S. M. Murtoza; Khan, Mumit
    The wide area of the application of HMM is in Speech Recognition where each spoken word is considered as a single unit to be recognized from the trained word network. Using this concept some research has been done for character recognition. In this paper, we present the training and recognition mechanism of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based multi font supported Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for Bangla character. In our approach the central idea is separate HMM model for each segmented character or word. We emphasize on word level segmentation and like to consider the single character as a word when the character appears alone after segmentation process is done. The system uses HTK toolkit for data preparation, model training from multiple samples and recognition. Features of each trained character are calculated by applying Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to each pixel value of the character image where the image is divided into several frames according to its size. The extracted features of each frame are used as discrete probability distributions that will be given as input parameter to each HMM model. In case of recognition a model for each separated character or word is build up using the same approach. This model is given to the HTK toolkit to perform the recognition using Viterbi Decoding. The experimental result shows significant performance.
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    BWN- A software platform for developing Bengali wordnet
    (BRAC University, 2008) Khan, Mumit; Faruqe, Farhana
    Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications are increasingly dependent on the availability of linguistic resources, ranging from digital lexica to rich tagged and annotated corpora. While these resources are readily available for digitally advanced languages such as English, these have yet to be developed for widely spoken but digitally immature languages such as Bengali. WordNet is a linguistic resource that can be used in, and for, a variety of applications from a digital dictionary to an automatic machine translator. To create a WordNet for a new language however is a significant challenge, not the least of which is the availability of the lexical data, followed by the software framework to build and manage the data. In this paper, we present BWN, a software framework to build and maintain a Bengali WordNet. We discuss in detail the design and implementation of BWN, concluding with a discussion of how it may be used in future to develop WordNets for other languages as well.
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    A decentralised approach to information retrieval for a developing country like Bangladesh
    (BRAC University, 2007) Ali, Hammad; Haque, Nafid
    In this paper, we talk about a decentralised information retrieval system which would be suitable for the developing countries that face the problem of limited bandwidth. In this paper we came up with an implementation that uses the existing technology in a novel manner to meet the specific needs of users in such countries. We considered the infrastructural limitations of a developing country like Bangladesh and thus the solution presented here performs just as well in similar situations anywhere else in the world. Our work has been tested for the Bangla language and the same procedure can be applied easily for any other language in any part of the world where there is need for such a system. We had to pick and choose from a set of software packages for one that would best serve our needs. We also had to take into consideration user convenience, for which we had to keep in mind the diverse demographics of people that might have need of such a system. Finally, we came up with the system with all the desired features.