Bangla Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Review of Classical, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Based Methods

The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation. Consequently, many Bangla-speaking people, who have limited command of English, face hurdles to utilize English resources. To bridge the gap between limited support and increasing demand, researchers conducted many experiments and developed valuable tools and techniques to create and process Bangla language materials. Many efforts are also ongoing to make it easy to use the Bangla language in the online and technical domains. There are some review papers to understand the past, previous, and future Bangla Natural Language Processing (BNLP) trends. The studies are mainly concentrated on the specific domains of BNLP, such as sentiment analysis, speech recognition, optical character recognition, and text summarization. There is an apparent scarcity of resources that contain a comprehensive study of the recent BNLP tools and methods. Therefore, in this paper, we present a thorough review of 71 BNLP research papers and categorize them into 11 categories, namely Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, Parsing, Parts of Speech Tagging, Question Answering System, Sentiment Analysis, Spam and Fake Detection, Text Summarization, Word Sense Disambiguation, and Speech Processing and Recognition. We study articles published between 1999 to 2021, and 50% of the papers were published after 2015. We discuss Classical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning approaches with different datasets while addressing the limitations and current and future trends of the BNLP.

Human Activity Analysis and Recognition from Smartphones using Machine Learning Techniques

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is considered a valuable research topic in the last few decades. Different types of machine learning models are used for this purpose, and this is a part of analyzing human behavior through machines. It is not a trivial task to analyze the data from wearable sensors for complex and high dimensions. Nowadays, researchers mostly use smartphones or smart home sensors to capture these data. In our paper, we analyze these data using machine learning models to recognize human activities, which are now widely used for many purposes such as physical and mental health monitoring. We apply different machine learning models and compare performances. We use Logistic Regression (LR) as the benchmark model for its simplicity and excellent performance on a dataset, and to compare, we take Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Additionally, we select the best set of parameters for each model by grid search. We use the HAR dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository as a standard dataset to train and test the models. Throughout the analysis, we can see that the Support Vector Machine performed (average accuracy 96.33%) far better than the other methods. We also prove that the results are statistically significant by employing statistical significance test methods.

Recent Advances in Deep Learning Techniques for Face Recognition

In recent years, researchers have proposed many deep learning (DL) methods for various tasks, and particularly face recognition (FR) made an enormous leap using these techniques. Deep FR systems benefit from the hierarchical architecture of the DL methods to learn discriminative face representation. Therefore, DL techniques significantly improve state-of-the-art performance on FR systems and encourage diverse and efficient real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of various FR systems that leverage the different types of DL techniques, and for the study, we summarize 168 recent contributions from this area. We discuss the papers related to different algorithms, architectures, loss functions, activation functions, datasets, challenges, improvement ideas, current and future trends of DL-based FR systems. We provide a detailed discussion of various DL methods to understand the current state-of-the-art, and then we discuss various activation and loss functions for the methods. Additionally, we summarize different datasets used widely for FR tasks and discuss challenges related to illumination, expression, pose variations, and occlusion. Finally, we discuss improvement ideas, current and future trends of FR tasks.