“Ora amar mukher Bhasha kaira nite chay” – 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 ancholik bhasha, or 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’s tongue, each dialect carries with it a unique sense of belonging and cultural heritage.
In this spirit, United International University Computer Club (UIU CCL) is presenting a national “Natural Language Processing” challenge on Kaggle, titled “Bhashamul: mukher bhasar khoje”, 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. Inspired by the sacrifice of language martyrs in the month of February the national datathon was run from February 8th to 28th, with a goal 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. To make this competition even more challenging and lucrative, we have an alluring Prize Money of 1lac BDT. Near to 100 teams from over 30 universities nationwide has registered in this challenge. Finally, after almost a month of hardwork and brainstorming of the teams, final round of the competition will take place onsite at UIU campus with the top 25 teams where they will finally refine their models and will be continuously evaluated by esteemed judges from March 1-2, 2024.
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 specialized curriculum. UIU CCL is the most prestigious and the biggest student organization under this department, which ensures fluent organizing of 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 to almost a thousand years, Bengali is lagging behind in language tech due to 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 into making this a reality.
Faculty Members, Officials, Students, participants, and distinguished guests were present in the program.
Messenger/Mumu
