Uddessho: An Extensive Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Author Intent Classification in Low-Resource Bangla Language

With the increasing popularity of daily information sharing and acquisition on the Internet, this paper introduces an innovative approach for intent classification in Bangla language, focusing on social media posts where individuals share their thoughts and opinions. The proposed method leverages multimodal data with particular emphasis on authorship identification, aiming to understand the underlying purpose behind textual content, especially in the context of varied user-generated posts on social media. Current methods often face challenges in low-resource languages like Bangla, particularly when author traits intricately link with intent, as observed in social media posts. To address this, we present the Multimodal-based Author Bangla Intent Classification (MABIC) framework, utilizing text and images to gain deeper insights into the conveyed intentions. We have created a dataset named "Uddessho," comprising 3,048 instances sourced from social media. Our methodology comprises two approaches for classifying textual intent and multimodal author intent, incorporating early fusion and late fusion techniques. In our experiments, the unimodal approach achieved an accuracy of 64.53% in interpreting Bangla textual intent. In contrast, our multimodal approach significantly outperformed traditional unimodal methods, achieving an accuracy of 76.19%. This represents an improvement of 11.66%. To our best knowledge, this is the first research work on multimodal-based author intent classification for low-resource Bangla language social media posts.

Explainable Convolutional Neural Networks for Retinal Fundus Classification and Cutting-Edge Segmentation Models for Retinal Blood Vessels from Fundus Images

Our research focuses on the critical field of early diagnosis of disease by examining retinal blood vessels in fundus images. While automatic segmentation of retinal blood vessels holds promise for early detection, accurate analysis remains challenging due to the limitations of existing methods, which often lack discrimination power and are susceptible to influences from pathological regions. Our research in fundus image analysis advances deep learning-based classification using eight pre-trained CNN models. To enhance interpretability, we utilize Explainable AI techniques such as Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, Score-CAM, Faster Score-CAM, and Layer CAM. These techniques illuminate the decision-making processes of the models, fostering transparency and trust in their predictions. Expanding our exploration, we investigate ten models, including TransUNet with ResNet backbones, Attention U-Net with DenseNet and ResNet backbones, and Swin-UNET. Incorporating diverse architectures such as ResNet50V2, ResNet101V2, ResNet152V2, and DenseNet121 among others, this comprehensive study deepens our insights into attention mechanisms for enhanced fundus image analysis. Among the evaluated models for fundus image classification, ResNet101 emerged with the highest accuracy, achieving an impressive 94.17%. On the other end of the spectrum, EfficientNetB0 exhibited the lowest accuracy among the models, achieving a score of 88.33%. Furthermore, in the domain of fundus image segmentation, Swin-Unet demonstrated a Mean Pixel Accuracy of 86.19%, showcasing its effectiveness in accurately delineating regions of interest within fundus images. Conversely, Attention U-Net with DenseNet201 backbone exhibited the lowest Mean Pixel Accuracy among the evaluated models, achieving a score of 75.87%.

Unraveling the Dominance of Large Language Models Over Transformer Models for Bangla Natural Language Inference: A Comprehensive Study

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a cornerstone of Natural Language Processing (NLP), providing insights into the entailment relationships between text pairings. It is a critical component of Natural Language Understanding (NLU), demonstrating the ability to extract information from spoken or written interactions. NLI is mainly concerned with determining the entailment relationship between two statements, known as the premise and hypothesis. When the premise logically implies the hypothesis, the pair is labeled "entailment". If the hypothesis contradicts the premise, the pair receives the "contradiction" label. When there is insufficient evidence to establish a connection, the pair is described as "neutral". Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various tasks, their effectiveness in NLI remains constrained by issues like low-resource domain accuracy, model overconfidence, and difficulty in capturing human judgment disagreements. This study addresses the underexplored area of evaluating LLMs in low-resourced languages such as Bengali. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we assess the performance of prominent LLMs and state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in Bengali NLP tasks, focusing on natural language inference. Utilizing the XNLI dataset, we conduct zero-shot and few-shot evaluations, comparing LLMs like GPT-3.5 Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro with models such as BanglaBERT, Bangla BERT Base, DistilBERT, mBERT, and sahajBERT. Our findings reveal that while LLMs can achieve comparable or superior performance to fine-tuned SOTA models in few-shot scenarios, further research is necessary to enhance our understanding of LLMs in languages with modest resources like Bengali. This study underscores the importance of continued efforts in exploring LLM capabilities across diverse linguistic contexts.