Natural Language Processing Competition held at UIU

"Ora Amaar Mukher Basha Kairaa Nite Chaay" - the legendary song lyrics, was one of the boldest slogans of our language martyrs, this legacy serves as a poignant reminder of the intrinsic link between language and identity, and the enduring importance of preserving linguistic diversity.

Embedded within the fabric of Bengali society are the regional dialects, which serve as repositories of local traditions, customs, and identities. From the melodious cadences of the Chattogram dialect to the rhythmic intonations of the Rajshahi tongue, each dialect carries with it a unique sense of belonging and cultural heritage.

In this spirit, United International University Computer Club (UIU CCL) organised a national "Natural Language Processing" challenge on Kaggle, titled "ভাষামূল: মুখের ভাষার খোঁজে", hosted by Department of Computer Science and Engineering and co-hosted by Bengali.Ai, which aims to establish a solution that can accurately transcribe Bengali text into IPA, taking into account the nuances of different regional dialects, reads a press release.

Inspired by the sacrifice of language martyrs in February, the national datathon was run from 8-28  February, to uphold the different dialects of the Bengali language by building AI technology that everyone can use; hoping to preserve the versatility of our mother tongue and uplift it in the global community.

Nearly 100 teams from over 30 universities nationwide registered in this challenge. Finally, after almost a month of hardwork and brainstorming of the teams, the final round of the competition took place onsite at UIU campus with the top 25 teams where they refined their models and were evaluated by esteemed judges from 1-2 March.

To make this competition even more challenging and lucrative, there was an alluring Prize Money of Tk1 lakh.

The Department of CSE at United International University is one of its prominent departments offering both undergraduate and graduate programs in computer science and engineering. In addition to these, UIU has taken a pioneering step by introducing a dedicated data science program, making it the first university in Bangladesh to offer such a specialised curriculum. UIU CCL is the most prestigious and the biggest student organisation under this department, which organised the event to ensure this dream to uphold the diversity of our Bengali language in the tech community comes to reality.

Bengali.AI is a research community of 7000+ researchers from around the world. Striving towards the same goal: Development of open-source language tech (Speech to Text Algorithms, Optical Character Recognition Systems, Grammar Checking and Fix Algorithms, Computational Linguistics Research, Indic Unicode Issues, Language Modeling etc) for Bengali.

Even with a huge number of native speakers and a rich heritage dating back almost a thousand years, Bengali is lagging behind in language tech due to a lack of curated large datasets and large scale computational modeling efforts. From government services to education, from agriculture to healthcare, Bengali language tech research would make lives easier for everyone.

For the last 6 years, Bengali.AI has been working towards creating effective collaborations between academia and industry to make this a reality.

Faculty Members, Officials, Students, participants, and distinguished guests were present in the program.