Advancing Bangla Punctuation Restoration by a Monolingual Transformer-Based Method and a Large-Scale Corpus
Mehedi Hasan Bijoy, Mir Fatema Afroz Faria, Mahbub E. Sobhani, Tanzid Ferdoush, Swakkhar Shatabda · 2023
Punctuation restoration is the endeavor of reinstating and rectifying missing or improper punctuation marks within a text, thereby eradicating ambiguity in written discourse.The Bangla punctuation restoration task has received little attention and exploration, despite the rising popularity of textual communication in the language.The primary hindrances in the advancement of the task revolve around the utilization of transformer-based methods and an openly accessible extensive corpus, challenges that we discovered remained unresolved in earlier efforts.In this study, we propose a baseline by introducing a monolingual transformer-based method named Jatikarok 1 , where the effectiveness of transfer learning has been meticulously scrutinized, and a large-scale corpus containing 1.48M source-target pairs to resolve the previous issues.The Jatikarok attains accuracy rates of 95.2%, 85.13%, and 91.36% on the BanglaPRCorpus, Prothom-Alo Balanced, and BanglaOPUS corpora, thereby establishing itself as the state-of-the-art method through its superior performance compared to BanglaT5 and T5-Small.Jatikarok and BanglaPRCorpus are publicly available at https://github.com/mehedihasanbijoy/ Jatikarok-and-BanglaPRCorpus.