Real Time Bangladeshi Sign Language Detection using Faster R-CNN

Bangladeshi Sign Language (BdSL) is a commonly used medium of communication for the hearing-impaired people in Bangladesh. Developing a real time system to detect these signs from images is a great challenge. In this paper, we present a technique to detect BdSL from images that performs in real time. Our method uses Convolutional Neural Network based object detection technique to detect the presence of signs in the image region and to recognize its class. For this purpose, we adopted Faster Region-based Convolutional Network approach and developed a dataset $-$ BdSLImset $-$ to train our system. Previous research works in detecting BdSL generally depend on external devices while most of the other vision-based techniques do not perform efficiently in real time. Our approach, however, is free from such limitations and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully identifies and recognizes Bangladeshi signs in real time.Comment: 6 pages, Accepted in International Conference on Innovation in Engineering and Technology (ICIET) 27-29 December, 2018, Dhaka, Banglades

Language and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond: In Honor of Robbins Burling

This volume celebrates the life and work of Robbins Burling, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, giant in the fields of anthropological linguistics, language evolution, and language pedagogy, and pioneer in the ethnography and linguistics of Tibeto-Burmanspeaking groups in the Northeast Indian region. We offer it to Professor Burling – Rob – on the occasion of his 90th birthday, on the occasion of the 60th year of his extraordinary scholarly productivity, and on the occasion of yet another – yet another! – field trip to Northeast India, where his career in anthropology and linguistics effectively began so many decades ago, and where he has amassed so many devoted friends and colleagues – including ourselves. (First paragraph of Editor's Introduction)

Design of an Offline Handwriting Recognition System Tested on the Bangla and Korean Scripts

This dissertation presents a flexible and robust offline handwriting recognition system which is tested on the Bangla and Korean scripts. Offline handwriting recognition is one of the most challenging and yet to be solved problems in machine learning. While a few popular scripts (like Latin) have received a lot of attention, many other widely used scripts (like Bangla) have seen very little progress. Features such as connectedness and vowels structured as diacritics make it a challenging script to recognize. A simple and robust design for offline recognition is presented which not only works reliably, but also can be used for almost any alphabetic writing system. The framework has been rigorously tested for Bangla and demonstrated how it can be transformed to apply to other scripts through experiments on the Korean script whose two-dimensional arrangement of characters makes it a challenge to recognize. The base of this design is a character spotting network which detects the location of different script elements (such as characters, diacritics) from an unsegmented word image. A transcript is formed from the detected classes based on their corresponding location information. This is the first reported lexicon-free offline recognition system for Bangla and achieves a Character Recognition Accuracy (CRA) of 94.8%. This is also one of the most flexible architectures ever presented. Recognition of Korean was achieved with a 91.2% CRA. Also, a powerful technique of autonomous tagging was developed which can drastically reduce the effort of preparing a dataset for any script. The combination of the character spotting method and the autonomous tagging brings the entire offline recognition problem very close to a singular solution. Additionally, a database named the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset was developed. This is one of the richest offline datasets currently available for Bangla and this has been made publicly accessible to accelerate the research progress. Many other tools were developed and experiments were conducted to more rigorously validate this framework by evaluating the method against external datasets (CMATERdb 1.1.1, Indic Word Dataset and REID2019: Early Indian Printed Documents). Offline handwriting recognition is an extremely promising technology and the outcome of this research moves the field significantly ahead

Adaptive Algorithms for Automated Processing of Document Images

Large scale document digitization projects continue to motivate interesting document understanding technologies such as script and language identification, page classification, segmentation and enhancement. Typically, however, solutions are still limited to narrow domains or regular formats such as books, forms, articles or letters and operate best on clean documents scanned in a controlled environment. More general collections of heterogeneous documents challenge the basic assumptions of state-of-the-art technology regarding quality, script, content and layout. Our work explores the use of adaptive algorithms for the automated analysis of noisy and complex document collections. We first propose, implement and evaluate an adaptive clutter detection and removal technique for complex binary documents. Our distance transform based technique aims to remove irregular and independent unwanted foreground content while leaving text content untouched. The novelty of this approach is in its determination of best approximation to clutter-content boundary with text like structures. Second, we describe a page segmentation technique called Voronoi++ for complex layouts which builds upon the state-of-the-art method proposed by Kise [Kise1999]. Our approach does not assume structured text zones and is designed to handle multi-lingual text in both handwritten and printed form. Voronoi++ is a dynamically adaptive and contextually aware approach that considers components' separation features combined with Docstrum [O'Gorman1993] based angular and neighborhood features to form provisional zone hypotheses. These provisional zones are then verified based on the context built from local separation and high-level content features. Finally, our research proposes a generic model to segment and to recognize characters for any complex syllabic or non-syllabic script, using font-models. This concept is based on the fact that font files contain all the information necessary to render text and thus a model for how to decompose them. Instead of script-specific routines, this work is a step towards a generic character and recognition scheme for both Latin and non-Latin scripts

Word formation in Bengali : a whole word morphological description and its theoretical implications

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Bilingual first language acquisition in Malay and English : a morphological and suprasegmental study in the development of plural expressions in a bilingual child

This thesis investigates the development of plural marking in a child raised in Malay and English simultaneously, from the morphological and prosodic perspective. For the morphological plural development, the child’s plural acquisition is analysed within the Processability Theory (PT) framework de Bot (1992) de Bot (1992) thus widening PT’s typological range of application to a language such as Malay, which belongs to the Austronesian family (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013). PT has been tested for morphological development in L2 English (Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Johnston, 2000) and several typologically different languages as well as bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) such as Japanese-English (Itani-Adams, 2013). However, PT has not been empirically tested for any language of the Austronesian family nor in a Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) constellation involving Malay and English. The Malay-English language pair is interesting because of the remarkably different linguistic mechanisms used for encoding plurality in the two languages; morphologically, Malay marks plurality through distinct forms of reduplication such as rumah-rumah ‘houses’, buah-buahan’ (plural form of buah ‘fruit’) and bukit-bukau ‘hills’ (Sew, 2007). In contrast, English uses morphological inflections -s suffixed to the stem, e.g., cat/cats, dog/dogs, book/books (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002). Malay reduplication, as previously shown, involves more than a single word, however, functionally speaking it is equivalent to one word plus a marker of plurality. Thus, prosodic mechanisms play a crucial role in distinguishing between mere repetition and grammatical reduplication in Malay (Gil, 2005). Since plurality is expressed very differently in each language, this study investigates how a bilingual child develops simultaneously two grammatical systems. The participant in this research is a female child named Rina, who was raised in Malay-English environment from birth. This investigation comprises of two parts; first is the longitudinal investigation of her plural acquisition from age 2;10 to 3;10. During this period, Rina was living in Australia, where the environmentally predominant language was English. The second complementary part is an investigation of Rina’s plural marking systems at age 4;8 when she had returned to Malaysia, where the predominant environmental language was Malay. For the longitudinal study, the database for the analyses was obtained from separate Malay and English recording sessions, which were conducted weekly from age 2;10 to 3;10. Likewise, the data for Rina’s plural expression at 4;8 was also obtained from separate Malay and English environment recordings. For the morphological plural development, results indicate that Rina developed two different systems to mark plurality in Malay and English. Her plural marking developed in the sequence predicted by PT. However, though she clearly distinguished the two languages, bidirectional influences from English to Malay and Malay to English were found in the corpus, both in the longitudinal study as well as at age 4;8. In the longitudinal study, it was found that in expressing plurals in Malay and English, Rina used various linguistic devices: one of the predominant strategies she employed in both languages was iteration, a strategy in which Rina expressed more than one objects by repeating the lexical item according to the number of individuated entities (hence four cats would be expressed as cat cat cat cat). Reduplication, the target grammatical Malay plural, only emerged at 3;8. Thus, we examine the prosodic development of the child’s iteration up till the emergence of reduplication. Findings indicate that the development from iteration to reduplication is gradual; the main acoustic correlate that she employed during the longitudinal study was final-syllable lengthening. She only began differentiating various prosodic mechanisms (such as pausing, duration and pitch) to distinguish repetition and reduplication in her plural marking at age 4;8. This study offers a new perspective on the interplay between the two languages in the early stages of grammatical development in a bilingual child. The specific features of plurality in Malay and English and how they develop in the bilingual child may shed light on the applicability of PT to BFLA. Also, the link between the child’s morphological development and prosodic mechanisms show that in acquiring the prosodic structures of reduplication, Rina creates partial and increasingly specific analyses of the grammatical forms, gradually approaching the conventional adult form

Body, Society, History: Enacting materialisms through performances

Die Dissertation versteht Kunst als Inszenierung verschiedener Theorien des Materialismus, des Neuen Materialismus und historischen Materialismus, die als konzeptionelle Werkzeuge dienen, um materiale Akteure und soziopolitische Prozesse als im Entstehen begriffen, relational und dynamisch zu verstehen. Die Dissertation untersucht anhand der Arbeiten von Lawrence Abu Hamdan die Politik der Sprache und wie die Materialität der Sprache politische Grenzen überschreitet. Die Problematisierung der Sprache als Signifikant setzt sich fort in der Analyse von Werken der Biokunst von Paul Vanouse und Spiess/Strecker, die sich mit DNA-Technologie auseinandersetzten und den organischen Tod sowie das Erfassen des Lebens im Sinne der Nekropolitik aus Sicht der Hypernatur in Frage stellen. Daran schließt sich eine Untersuchung der choreografischen Arbeiten mit Maschinen von Geumhyung Jeong an, welche die relationale Koemergenz des Verbunds von Mensch und Maschine hervorheben. Die Dissertation schließt mit den transhistorischen Arbeiten zur südost- und ostasiatischen Moderne von Ho Tzu Nyen und Royce Ng, in welchen die Figuren des Tigers und des Vampirs das ungebremste Verlangen im Kapitalismus verkörpern. Beim Durchqueren verschiedener Historien und Geografien und dem verknüpfen diverser Thematiken einschließlich Animismus, Technologie, Kolonialismus und Konfuzianismus geht es immer um die Kernfrage, die Agentialität im Material und den (in)dividuellen Körpern zu lokalisieren.The PhD dissertation takes art as enactments of different theories of materialism – both new materialism(s) and historical materialism, to provide conceptual tools through which both material agents and socio-political processes could be understood in emergent, relational and dynamic ways. The dissertation examines the politics of language and how the materiality of language could transgress political boundaries by focusing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works. The problematisation of language as a signifier continues with bioart works engaging with DNA technology from Paul Vanouse and Spiess/Strecker, which also challenge organic death and the capture of life under necropolitics with hypernature. This is followed by an analysis of Geumhyung Jeong’s choreographic works with machines, which highlight the relational co-emergence with the man-machine assemblage. The dissertation ends with Ho Tzu Nyen and Royce Ng’s transhistorical works on Southeast and East Asian modernity, with the figures of the tiger and the vampire embodying the free flow of desire in capitalism. Traversing different histories and geographies while interweaving diverse topics including animism, technology, colonialism and Confucianism, the core question remains the same throughout the dissertation: to locate the agency in the material and the (in)dividual bodies