This paper reports the development of the first dependency treebank for the Sinhala language (STB). Sinhala, which is morphologically rich, is a low-resource language with few linguistic and computational resources available publicly. This treebank consists of 100 sentences taken from a large contemporary written text corpus. These sentences were annotated manually according to the Universal Dependencies framework. In this paper, apart from elaborating on the approach that has been followed to create the treebank, we have also discussed some interesting syntactic constructions found in the corpus and how we have handled them using the current Universal Dependencies specification.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has experienced several paradigm shifts over the years from template-based approaches and statistical modeling to the popular GMM-HMM approach and then to deep learning hybrid model DNN-HMM. The latest shift is to end-to-end (e2e) DNN architecture. We present a study to build an e2e ASR system using state-of-the-art deep learning models to verify the applicability of e2e ASR models for the highly inflected and yet low-resource Sinhala language. We experimented on e2e Lattice-Free Maximum Mutual Information (e2e LF-MMI) model with the baseline statistical models with 40 hours of training data to evaluate. We used the same corpus for creating language models and lexicon in our previous study, which resulted in the best accuracy for the Sinhala language. We were able to achieve a Word-error-rate (WER) of 28.55% for Sinhala, only slightly worse than the existing best hybrid model. Our model, however, is more context-independent and faster for Sinhala speech recognition and so more suitable for general purpose speech-to-text translation.