Bangla Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Analysis of Classical, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Based Methods

Abstract

The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation. Consequently, many Bangla-speaking people, who have limited command of English, face hurdles to utilize English resources. To bridge the gap between limited support and increasing demand, researchers conducted many experiments and developed valuable tools and techniques to create and process Bangla language materials. Many efforts are also ongoing to make it easy to use the Bangla language in the online and technical domains. There are some review papers to understand the past, previous, and future Bangla Natural Language Processing (BNLP) trends. The studies are mainly concentrated on the specific domains of BNLP, such as sentiment analysis, speech recognition, optical character recognition, and text summarization. There is an apparent scarcity of resources that contain a comprehensive study of the recent BNLP tools and methods. Therefore, in this paper, we present a thorough review of 71 BNLP research papers and categorize them into 11 categories,