Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. However, their evaluation has been predominantly confined to high-resource languages such as English. In this paper, we introduce a manually translated Bangla multi-step reasoning dataset derived from the English Reveal dataset, featuring both binary and non-binary question types. We conduct a controlled evaluation of English-centric and Bangla-centric multilingual small language models on the original dataset and our translated version to compare their ability to exploit relevant reasoning steps to produce correct answers. Our results show that, in comparable settings, reasoning context is beneficial for more challenging non-binary questions, but models struggle to employ relevant Bangla reasoning steps effectively. We conclude by exploring how reasoning steps contribute to models' predictions, highlighting different trends across models and languages.

Bangla or Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh, people from different regions don't talk in proper Bangla. Every division of Bangladesh has its own local language like Sylheti, Chittagong etc. In recent years some papers were published on Bangla language like sentiment analysis, fake news detection and classifications, but a few of them were on Bangla languages. This research is for the local language and this particular paper is on Sylheti language. It presented a comprehensive system using Natural Language Processing or NLP techniques for translating Pure or Modern Bangla to locally spoken Sylheti Bangla language. Total 1200 data used for training 3 models LSTM, Bi-LSTM and Seq2Seq and LSTM scored the best in performance with 89.3% accuracy. The findings of this research may contribute to the growth of Bangla NLP researchers for future more advanced innovations.

One of the most alarming issues in digital society is hate speech (HS) on social media. The severity is so high that researchers across the globe are captivated by this domain. A notable amount of work has been conducted to address the identification and alarm system. However, a noticeable gap exists, especially for low-resource languages. Comprehensive datasets are the main problem among the constrained resource languages, such as Bangla. Interestingly, hate speech or any particular speech has no single dimensionality. Similarly, the hate component can simultaneously have multiple abusive attributes, which seems to be missed in the existing datasets. Thus, a multi-label Bangla hate speech dataset named BOISHOMMO has been compiled and evaluated in this work. That includes categories of HS across race, gender, religion, politics, and more. With over two thousand annotated examples, BOISHOMMO provides a nuanced understanding of hate speech in Bangla and highlights the complexities of processing non-Latin scripts. Apart from evaluating with multiple algorithmic approaches, it also highlights the complexities of processing Bangla text and assesses model performance. This unique multi-label approach enriches future hate speech detection and analysis studies for low-resource languages by providing a more nuanced, diverse dataset.

The domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has experienced notable progress in the evolution of Bangla Question Answering (QA) systems. This paper presents a comprehensive review of seven research articles that contribute to the progress in this domain. These research studies explore different aspects of creating question-answering systems for the Bangla language. They cover areas like collecting data, preparing it for analysis, designing models, conducting experiments, and interpreting results. The papers introduce innovative methods like using LSTM-based models with attention mechanisms, context-based QA systems, and deep learning techniques based on prior knowledge. However, despite the progress made, several challenges remain, including the lack of well-annotated data, the absence of high-quality reading comprehension datasets, and difficulties in understanding the meaning of words in context. Bangla QA models' precision and applicability are constrained by these challenges. This review emphasizes the significance of these research contributions by highlighting the developments achieved in creating Bangla QA systems as well as the ongoing effort required to get past roadblocks and improve the performance of these systems for actual language comprehension tasks.

Mostofa Akbar Department of CSE Bangladesh University of Engineering & T echnology Dhaka, Bangladesh mostofa@cse.buet.ac.bd Abstract --Emotion artificial intelligence is a field of study that focuses on figuring out how to recognize emotions, especially in the area of text mining. T oday is the age of social media which has opened a door for us to share our individual expressions, emotions, and perspectives on any event. We can analyze sentiment on social media posts to detect positive, negative, or emotional behavior toward society. One of the key challenges in sentiment analysis is to identify depressed text from social media text that is a root cause of mental ill-health. Furthermore, depression leads to severe impairment in day-to-day living and is a major source of suicide incidents. In this paper, we apply natural language processing techniques on Facebook texts for conducting emotion analysis focusing on depression using multiple machine learning algorithms. Preprocessing steps like stemming, stop word removal, etc. are used to clean the collected data, and feature extraction techniques like stylometric feature, TF-IDF, word embedding, etc. are applied to the collected dataset which consists of 983 texts collected from social media posts. In the process of class prediction, LSTM, GRU, support vector machine, and Naive-Bayes classifiers have been used. We have presented the results using the primary classification metrics including F1-score, and accuracy. This work focuses on depression detection from social media posts to help psychologists to analyze sentiment from shared posts which may reduce the undesirable behaviors of depressed individuals through diagnosis and treatment. I NTRODUCTION Text is the most important means of communication in today's world. Popular online social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. are mainly text-based. The rapid growth of Social Media has created enough opportunities to share information across time and space. Users are now comfortable contributing more to the content of social media websites and posting their own material. The emergence of internet-based media sources has resulted in the availability of substantial user data for the emotional analysis of text and images.

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.

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.

This research paper presents a comprehensive review-based study on various Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies. TTS technology is an important aspect of human-computer interaction, enabling machines to convert written text into audible speech. The paper examines the different TTS technologies available, including concatenative TTS, formant synthesis TTS, and statistical parametric TTS. The study focuses on comparing the advantages and limitations of these technologies in terms of their naturalness of voice, the level of complexity of the system, and their suitability for different applications. In addition, the paper explores the latest advancements in TTS technology, including neural TTS and hybrid TTS. The findings of this research will provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and users who want to understand the different TTS technologies and their suitability for specific applications.

This paper presents our work for the Violence Inciting Text Detection shared task in the First Workshop on Bangla Language Processing. Social media has accelerated the propagation of hate and violence-inciting speech in society. It is essential to develop efficient mechanisms to detect and curb the propagation of such texts. The problem of detecting violence-inciting texts is further exacerbated in low-resource settings due to sparse research and less data. The data provided in the shared task consists of texts in the Bangla language, where each example is classified into one of the three categories defined based on the types of violence-inciting texts. We try and evaluate several BERT-based models, and then use an ensemble of the models as our final submission. Our submission is ranked 10th in the final leaderboard of the shared task with a macro F1 score of 0.737.

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.