Voice-Based Smart Assistant System for Vehicles using RASA

Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources, and accessibility around the clock, chatbots can be employed in vehicles too. Due to people's propensity to divert their attention away from the task of driving while engaging in other activities like calling, playing music, navigation, and getting updates on the weather forecast and latest news, road safety has declined and accidents have increased as a result. It would be advantageous to automate these tasks using voice commands rather than carrying them out manually. This paper focuses on the development of a voice-based smart assistance application for vehicles based on the RASA framework. The smart assistant provides functionalities like navigation, communication via calls, getting weather forecasts and the latest news updates, and music that are completely voice-based in nature.

Student Activity Recognition in Classroom Environments using Transfer Learning

The recent advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning facilitate automation in various applications including home automation, smart surveillance systems, and healthcare among others. Human Activity Recognition is one of its emerging applications, which can be implemented in a classroom environment to enhance safety, efficiency, and overall educational quality. This paper proposes a system for detecting and recognizing the activities of students in a classroom environment. The dataset has been structured and recorded by the authors since a standard dataset for this task was not available at the time of this study. Transfer learning, a widely adopted method within the field of deep learning, has proven to be helpful in complex tasks like image and video processing. Pretrained models including VGG-16, ResNet-50, InceptionV3, and Xception are used for feature extraction and classification tasks. Xception achieved an accuracy of 93%, on the novel classroom dataset, outperforming the other three models in consideration. The system proposed in this study aims to introduce a safer and more productive learning environment for students and educators.

Mavericks at NADI 2023 Shared Task: Unravelling Regional Nuances through Dialect Identification using Transformer-based Approach

In this paper, we present our approach for the "Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) Shared Task 2023". We highlight our methodology for subtask 1 which deals with country-level dialect identification. Recognizing dialects plays an instrumental role in enhancing the performance of various downstream NLP tasks such as speech recognition and translation. The task uses the Twitter dataset (TWT-2023) that encompasses 18 dialects for the multi-class classification problem. Numerous transformer-based models, pre-trained on Arabic language, are employed for identifying country-level dialects. We fine-tune these state-of-the-art models on the provided dataset. The ensembling method is leveraged to yield improved performance of the system. We achieved an F1-score of 76.65 (11th rank on the leaderboard) on the test dataset.

Mavericks at ArAIEval Shared Task: Towards a Safer Digital Space -- Transformer Ensemble Models Tackling Deception and Persuasion

In this paper, we highlight our approach for the "Arabic AI Tasks Evaluation (ArAiEval) Shared Task 2023". We present our approaches for task 1-A and task 2-A of the shared task which focus on persuasion technique detection and disinformation detection respectively. Detection of persuasion techniques and disinformation has become imperative to avoid distortion of authentic information. The tasks use multigenre snippets of tweets and news articles for the given binary classification problem. We experiment with several transformer-based models that were pre-trained on the Arabic language. We fine-tune these state-of-the-art models on the provided dataset. Ensembling is employed to enhance the performance of the systems. We achieved a micro F1-score of 0.742 on task 1-A (8th rank on the leaderboard) and 0.901 on task 2-A (7th rank on the leaderboard) respectively.