Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research

Understand

Sinhala is the native language of the Sinhalese people who make up the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka.

• The language belongs to the globe-spanning language tree, Indo-European.
• However, due to poverty in both linguistic and economic capital, Sinhala, in the perspective of Natural Language Processing tools and research, remains a resource-poor language which has neither the economic drive its cousin English has nor the sheer push of the law of numbers a language such as Chinese has.
• A number of research groups from Sri Lanka have noticed this dearth and the resultant dire need for proper tools and research for Sinhala natural language processing.