Nisansa Dilushan de Silva

I am a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I obtained my Ph.D (2020, advisor: Dejing Dou) and MS (2016) degrees in Computer and Information Science from University of Oregon, USA and my BSc (Hons) in Computer Science & Engineering (2011) degree from University of Moratuwa. I joined University of Moratuwa as a lecturer in 2011. From 2013 to 2014, I worked as a researcher at LIRNEasia. In 2018, I worked as a Givens Associate at Argonne National Laboratory, USA. I have over 80 peer reviewed publications in the field of computer science, mostly under the subfields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, earning more than 1400 citations. I am also an associate member of the IESL.

Professional Experience

  • Present 2020

    Senior Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2021 2020

    Research Fellow

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2020 2014

    Graduate Research/Teaching Fellow

    University of Oregon, Department of Computer and Information Science,
    USA.

  • 2018 2018

    Givens Associate

    Argonne National Laboratory,
    USA.

  • 2020 2011

    Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Researcher

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Visiting Lecturer

    Northshore College of Business and Technology,
    Sri Lanka

Education

  • Ph.D. 2020

    Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • MS 2016

    MS in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • BSc2011

    B.Sc Engineering (Hons)in Computer Science & Engineering

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Featured Research

Building a WordNet for Sinhala


I. Wijesiri, M. Gallage, B. Gunathilaka, M. Lakjeewa, D. Wimalasuriya, G. Dias, R. Paranavithana, and N. de Silva

Proceedings of the Seventh Global WordNet Conference, 01 2014, pp. 100--108,

Sinhala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and is used by over 19 million people. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages and its origins date back to at least 2000 years. It has developed into its current form over a long period of time with influences from a wide variety of languages including Tamil, Portuguese and English. As for any other language, a WordNet is extremely important for Sinhala to take it into the digital era. This paper is based on the project to develop a WordNet for Sinhala based on the English (Princeton) WordNet. It describes how we overcame the challenges in adding Sinhala specific characteristics which were deemed important by Sinhala language experts to the WordNet while keeping the structure of the original English WordNet. It also presents the details of the crowdsourcing system we developed as a part of the project consisting of a NoSQL database in the backend and a web-based frontend. We conclude by discussing the possibility of adapting this architecture for other languages and the road ahead for the Sinhala WordNet and Sinhala NLP.