Nadeeshani Pathirennehelage


2016

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Automatic Creation of a Sentence Aligned Sinhala-Tamil Parallel Corpus
Riyafa Abdul Hameed | Nadeeshani Pathirennehelage | Anusha Ihalapathirana | Maryam Ziyad Mohamed | Surangika Ranathunga | Sanath Jayasena | Gihan Dias | Sandareka Fernando
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (WSSANLP2016)

A sentence aligned parallel corpus is an important prerequisite in statistical machine translation. However, manual creation of such a parallel corpus is time consuming, and requires experts fluent in both languages. Automatic creation of a sentence aligned parallel corpus using parallel text is the solution to this problem. In this paper, we present the first ever empirical evaluation carried out to identify the best method to automatically create a sentence aligned Sinhala-Tamil parallel corpus. Annual reports from Sri Lankan government institutions were used as the parallel text for aligning. Despite both Sinhala and Tamil being under-resourced languages, we were able to achieve an F-score value of 0.791 using a hybrid approach that makes use of a bilingual dictionary.