Nazia Tasnim

Author directory

2026

Entity-level unlearning is usually evaluated by what a model says: whether it stops naming the target, refuses a query, or shifts a Truth Ratio distribution. These output-level tests, however, do not show whether a subject’s internal representation has been attenuated. We introduce the Entity Representation Unlearning Framework (ERUF), a representation-aware framework that mines subject-specific activation signatures, suppresses the corresponding activation direction, and distills the behavior into LoRA parameters. Among evaluated baselines, ERUF is the only method that jointly achieves surface level suppression, internal attenuation, and utility preservation. On TOFU forget10, ERUF achieves FQ =0.99 and MU =0.62, matching reported oracle utility while approaching oracle forget quality. Across most standard foundation-model settings, ERUF maintains low leakage and low internal target activation (SMR =0.00–1.10%, EL10 <0.06, utility drift <3%). On Llama-3.1-8B, adversarial entity recovery falls from 63.89% to 20.15%, while name-agnostic recovery decreases by 72.7–77.4%. Joint surface/internal diagnostics further reveal scale-dependent behavior in reasoning-prior models that surface metrics alone would miss. We interpret these results as operational evidence of representation-level attenuation, not as a formal guarantee of irreversible deletion. Code is available in the repository.

2025

Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations, but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out-of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available.
Recent progress in NLP research has demonstrated remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. While recent multilingual benchmarks have advanced cultural evaluation for LLMs, critical gaps remain in capturing the nuances of low-resource cultures. Our work addresses these limitations through a Bengali Language Cultural Knowledge (BLanCK) dataset including folk traditions, culinary arts, and regional dialects. Our investigation of several multilingual language models shows that while these models perform well in non-cultural categories, they struggle significantly with cultural knowledge and performance improves substantially across all models when context is provided, emphasizing context-aware architectures and culturally curated training data.

2022

Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively pretrained on the Bangla language with the performance of ELECTRA-based models pretrained on English to achieve competitive performance on the Track-11. Besides providing a system description, we will also present the outcomes of our experiments on architectural decisions, dataset augmentations, and post-competition findings.