The United International University Inter University NLP Competition "ভাষামূল: মূখের ভাষার খোঁজে" held from February 8th to February 20th, 2024, on Kaggle, March 1st and 2nd, 2024 onsite witnessed enthusiastic participation from various institutions across Bangladesh. Team_Khita_Kortesi, led by Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean, in securing the "1st Runners-up" position in the competition.
Team_Khita_Kortesi was led by Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean from the CSE 26th Batch, with members including Nazmus Sakib and Ashraful Islam Shanto Sikder from the IIT 11th Batch. The name is a tribute to team member Ashraful Islam Shanto Sikder’s mother language Sylheti.
The competition unfolded over a span of 20 days, during which participants engaged in developing solutions for IPA transcription of Bengali text with regional dialects. Phase 1 of the Competition saw active participation, with 98 teams and 450 entries submitted on Kaggle Subsequently, Phase 2, conducted on March 1st and 2nd, involved the top 20 teams advancing to On-site presentations at UIU. The judging criteria encompassed solution quality, presentation effectiveness, and inference time.
Team_Khita_Kortesi employed innovative methodologies to tackle the challenges of the competition. They introduced a T5 (Text to Text Generation Transformer by Google) model with special preprocessing and post-processing methods. Additionally, due to technical constraints in cloud-based alternatives, the team utilized a specialized hardware provided by Dr. Md. Mosaddek Khan, featuring an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU with 24GB of memory.
Team_Khita_Kortesi's diligent efforts and innovative approaches led them to secure the "1st Runners-up" position in the competition. Their success underscores their commendable prowess and dedication to excellence in natural language processing.