Bangla is a low-resource, highly agglutinative language. Thus it is challenging to facilitate an effective search of Bangla documents. We have created a gold standard dataset containing query document relevance pairs for evaluation purposes. We utilise Named Entities to improve the retrieval effectiveness of traditional Bangla search algorithms. We suggest a reasonable starting model for leveraging implicit preference feedback based on the user search behaviour to enhance the results retrieved by the Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) approach. We use contextual sentence embeddings obtained via Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding (LaBSE) to rerank the candidate documents retrieved by the traditional search algorithms (tf-idf) based on the top sentences that are most relevant to the query. This paper presents our empirical findings across these directions and critically analyses the results.

Neural network based word embeddings, such as Word2Vec and Glove, are purely data driven in that they capture the distributional information about words from the training corpus. Past works have attempted to improve these embeddings by incorporating semantic knowledge from lexical resources like WordNet. Some techniques like retrofitting modify word embeddings in the post-processing stage while some others use a joint learning approach by modifying the objective function of neural networks. In this paper, we discuss two novel approaches for incorporating semantic knowledge into word embeddings. In the first approach, we take advantage of Levy et al’s work which showed that using SVD based methods on co-occurrence matrix provide similar performance to neural network based embeddings. We propose a ‘sprinkling’ technique to add semantic relations to the co-occurrence matrix directly before factorization. In the second approach, WordNet similarity scores are used to improve the retrofitting method. We evaluate the proposed methods in both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks and observe significant improvements over the baselines in many of the datasets.

Literature in Molecular Biology is abundant with linguistic metaphors. There have been works in the past that attempt to draw parallels between linguistics and biology, driven by the fundamental premise that proteins have a language of their own. Since word detection is crucial to the decipherment of any unknown language, we attempt to establish a problem mapping from natural language text to protein sequences at the level of words. Towards this end, we explore the use of an unsupervised text segmentation algorithm to the task of extracting “biological words” from protein sequences. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using domain knowledge to complement data driven approaches in the text segmentation task, as well as in its biological counterpart. We also propose a novel extrinsic evaluation measure for protein words through protein family classification.