Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar

NLP Applied Scientist @ Dialpad

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Email: tahmid.iut{at}outlook.com


Major Recent Updates
2 papers accepted: 1 at NAACL 2024 and 1 at LREC-COLING 2024
5 papers accepted at EMNLP 2023 (3 in Conference, 2 in Workshop)
3  papers presented at ACL 2023 (2 in Conference, 1 in Workshop)

About me

I am currently working as an NLP Applied Scientist at Dialpad. I am also a Course Director (Adjunct Faculty) at York University, Canada. Prior to that, I completed my M.Sc. (Thesis-based) in Computer Science from York University. For my M.Sc. thesis, I conducted research on the application of Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing under the supervision of Prof. Jimmy Huang and Prof. Enamul Hoque Prince. In particular, I utilized Deep Learning for various Question Answering tasks, such as Answer Sentence Selection and Answer Summary Generation. 

Education

M.Sc. in Computer Science
York University, Canada
September 2018 to December 2020

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
Islamic University of Technology, Bangladesh
December 2011 to December 2015

Work Experience

NLP Applied Scientist @ Dialpad
February 2021 to Present

Course Director @ York University
September 2022 to Present

Research Assistant @ York University
September 2018 to January 2021

Deep Learning Research Intern @ Streamline Genomics
September 2020 to December 2020

Machine Learning Research Intern @ Dapasoft Inc
January 2019 to August 2020

Teaching Assistant @ York University
September 2018 to May 2020

Adjunct Lecturer @ Leading University, Sylhet
May 2016 to August 2018

Selected Publications

Tiny Titans: Can Smaller Large Language Models Punch Above Their Weight in the Real World for Meeting Summarization?
Xue-Yong Fu*, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar*, Elena Khasanova, Cheng Chen, Shashi Bhushan TN
Accepted for Publication at NAACL 2024 (Industry Track)
*Equal Contribution First Author

A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, M Saiful Bari, Mizanur Rahman, Md Amran Hossen Bhuiyan, Shafiq Joty, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Findings)

AI Coach Assist: An Automated Approach for Call Recommendation in Contact Centers for Agent Coaching
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Xue-Yong Fu, Mahsa Azizi, Shashi Bhushan TN, Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Industry Track)

Building Real-World Meeting Summarization Systems using Large Language Models: A Practical Perspective
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Xue-Yong Fu, Cheng Chen, Shashi Bhushan TN
Published in the Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (Industry Track)

Can Large Language Models Fix Data Annotation Errors? An Empirical Study Using Debatepedia for Query-Focused Text Summarization
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mizanur Rahman, Israt Jahan, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (Findings)

Unveiling the Essence of Poetry: Introducing a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Poem Summarization
Ridwan Mahbub, Ifrad Towhid Khan, Samiha Shafiq Anuva, Md Shihab Shahriar, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed
Published in the Proceedings of  EMNLP 2023 (Main)

An Auto Encoder-based Dimensionality Reduction Technique for Efficient Entity Linking in Business Phone Conversations
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Jonathan Johnston, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan TN, Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of SIGIR 2022 (Industry Track)

BLINK with Elasticsearch for Efficient Entity Linking in Business Conversations
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Aliaksandr Martsinovich,  Jonathan Johnston, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan TN, Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of NAACL 2022 (Industry Track)

Entity-level Sentiment Analysis in Contact Center Telephone Conversations
Xue-Yong Fu, Cheng Chen, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shayna Gardiner, Pooja Hiranandani, Shashi Bhushan TN
Published in the Proceedings of EMNLP 2022 (Industry Track)

Domain Adaptation with Pre-trained Transformers for Query Focused Abstractive Text Summarization
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Huang
Published  in the Computational Linguistics Journal

WSL-DS: Weakly Supervised Learning with Distant Supervision for Query Focused Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Proceedings of COLING 2020 

Contextualized Embeddings based Transformer Encoder for Sentence Similarity Modeling in Answer Selection Task
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Jimmy Huang, Enamul Hoque
Published in the Proceedings of LREC 2020

Improving Named Entity Recognition in Telephone Conversations via Effective Active Learning with Human in the Loop
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan TN,  Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of  DaSH Workshop @ EMNLP 2022 [Won the best paper award] (Also got accepted at the HiLL workshop @ NIPS 2022)

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Tasks
Israt Jahan, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Chun Peng, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Computers in Biology and Medicine Journal

Utilizing BERT for Information Retrieval: Survey, Applications, Resources and Challenges
Jiajia Wang, Jimmy X Huang, Xinhui Tu, Junmei Wang, Angela J Huang, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Amran Bhuiyan
Published in the ACM Computing Surveys Journal

BenLLMEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP.
Mohsinul Kabir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md. Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, M. Saiful Bari, Enamul Hoque
Published in the Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024

Are LLMs Reliable Judges? A Study on the Factuality Evaluation Capabilities of LLMs
Xue-Yong Fu, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Shashi Bhushan TN
Published at GEM Workshop 2023 @ EMNLP 2023

Evaluation of ChatGPT on Biomedical Tasks: A Zero-Shot Comparison with Fine-Tuned Generative Transformers
Israt Jahan, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Chun Peng, Jimmy Huang
Published at BioNLP @ ACL 2023

Extending Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection in Big Data via K-Means
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Jimmy Huang, Vladan Smetana, Chris Stewart, Kees Pouw, Aijun An, Stephen Chan, Lei Liu
Published in the ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS) Journal

DEPTWEET: A Typology for Social Media Texts to Detect Depression Severities
Mohsinul Kabir, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Bakhtiar Hasan, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Tarun Kumar Joarder, Hasan Mahmud, Kamrul Hasan
Published in the Computers in Human Behavior Journal

ChartSumm: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Automatic Chart Summarization of Long and Short Summaries
Raian Rahman, Rizvi Hasan, Abdullah Al Farhad, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Md. Hamjajul Ashmafee, Abu Raihan Mostofa Kamal
Published in the Proceedings of Canadian AI 2023

Multihop Factual Claim Verification Using Natural Language Prompts
Md Mezbaur Rahman, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Md Azam Hossain, Abu Raihan Mostofa Kamal
Published in the Proceedings of Canadian AI 2023

Query Focused Abstractive Summarization via Incorporating Query Relevance and Transfer Learning with Transformer Models
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Proceedings of Canadian AI 2020

A Localized Fault Tolerant Load Balancing Algorithm for RFID Systems
Ahnaf Munir, Md. Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Md Sakhawat Hossen, Salimur Choudhury
Published in the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing

An Effective, Performant Named Entity Recognition System for Noisy Business Telephone Conversation Transcripts
Xue-Yong Fu,  Cheng Chen,  Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shashi Bhushan TN,  Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of WNUT Workshop @ COLING 2022

Improving Punctuation Restoration for Speech Transcripts via External Data
Xue-Yong Fu,  Cheng Chen,  Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shashi Bhushan TN,  Simon Corston-Oliver
Published in the Proceedings of WNUT Workshop @ EMNLP 2021

BanglaCHQ-Summ: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Medical Queries in Bangla Conversational Speech
Alvi Aveen Khan, Fida Kamal, Mohammad Abrar Chowdhury, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed
Published in the Proceedings of the Bangla Language Processing Workshop @ EMNLP 2023

Utilizing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Answer Selection
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Enamul Hoque, Jimmy Huang
Published in the Proceedings of AMMCS 2019

Skills

Languages: Python, C, C++, Java, SQL

Deep Learning and Machine Learning: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Kubeflow, MLlib

Natural Language Processing: HuggingFace, NLTK, spaCy

Web & Mobile Development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Android, Xamarin

Others: Apache Spark, Elasticsearch, BigQuery, Kibana, Numpy, Pandas, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD,  Jira, CUDA, Linux Environments

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