PI: Dejing Dou
We propose to advance biomedical natural language processing by combining ontology-based reasoning, semantic search, and embedding-driven methods to improve information extraction, representation, and consistency detection in biomedical texts.
PI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to advance natural language processing for low-resource settings by leveraging data augmentation, transfer learning, and model adaptation techniques to overcome the scarcity of annotated data and linguistic resources.
PI: Rohan Samarajiva
We propose to investigate the role of natural language processing in government by building methods, frameworks, and resources that enable data-driven policy-making while ensuring ethical, transparent, and inclusive outcomes.
PI: Dejing Dou
We propose to advance methods for semantic oppositeness detection in natural language, focusing on embedding-based models and contextual representations to improve reasoning and error detection in text.
PI: Nisansa de Silva
This project delves into the synergy between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the legal domain, presenting novel solutions to enduring challenges.
PI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to build and analyze Sinhala language resources, datasets, and models to strengthen NLP research for this low-resource language, while connecting it to English and Tamil through bilingual lexicons, embeddings, and cross-lingual methods.
PI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to advance social media text analysis by combining linguistic study, preprocessing, and deep learning models to better capture sentiment, structure, and meaning in informal, large-scale user-generated text.
Dissertations
Theses: BSc
Vindula Jayawardana, Keet Sugathadasa, Dimuthu Lakmal, and Buddhi Rathnayake, "Ontology-Based Legal Information Extraction", University of Moratuwa, 2018
Dimuthu Upeksha, Chamila Wijayarathna, Maduranga Siriwardena, and Lahiru Lasandun, "Sinmin - Sinhala Corpus Project", University of Moratuwa, 2015
Book chapters
N. H. Nisansa D de Silva, "Relational Databases and Biomedical Big Data", Bioinformatics in MicroRNA Research, pp. 69--81, 2017. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-7046-9_5
Journal Papers
Vihanga Jayawickrama, Gihan Weeraprameshwara, Nisansa de Silva, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, "Facebook for Sentiment Analysis: Baseline Models to Predict Facebook Reactions of Sinhala Posts", The International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions, vol. 15, no. 2, 2022. doi: 10.4038/icter.v15i2.7248
Julia Kreutzer, Isaac Caswell, Lisa Wang, Ahsan Wahab, Daan van Esch, Nasanbayar Ulzii-Orshikh, Allahsera Tapo, Nishant Subramani, Artem Sokolov, Claytone Sikasote, and others, "Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets", Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 10, pp. 50--72, 2022. doi: 10.1162/tacl_a_00447
Sriganesh Lokanathan, Gabriel E Kreindler, N. H. Nisana de Silva, Yuhei Miyauchi, Dedunu Dhananjaya, and Rohan Samarajiva, "The Potential of Mobile Network Big Data as a Tool in Colombo's Transportation and Urban Planning", Information Technologies \& International Development, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. pp--63, 2016
Conference Papers
Gihan Weeraprameshwara, Vihanga Jayawickrama, Nisansa de Silva, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, "Sentiment Analysis with Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study on a Decade of Sinhala Language Facebook Data", in 2022 The 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Electronics Engineering, Association for Computing Machinery, 2022, pp. 16-22. doi: 10.1145/3512826.3512829
Vihanga Jayawickrama, Gihan Weeraprameshwara, Nisansa de Silva, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, "Seeking Sinhala Sentiment: Predicting Facebook Reactions of Sinhala Posts", in 2021 21st International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICter), 2021, pp. 177-182. doi: 10.1109/ICter53630.2021.9774796 
Nisansa de Silva and Dejing Dou, "Semantic Oppositeness Embedding Using an Autoencoder-based Learning Model", in Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2019, pp. 159--174. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-27615-7_12
Keet Sugathadasa, Buddhi Ayesha, Nisansa de Silva, Amal Shehan Perera, Vindula Jayawardana, Dimuthu Lakmal, and Madhavi Perera, "Legal Document Retrieval using Document Vector Embeddings and Deep Learning", in Science and information conference, 2018, pp. 160--175. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-01177-2_12
Keet Sugathadasa, Buddhi Ayesha, Nisansa de Silva, Amal Shehan Perera, Vindula Jayawardana, Dimuthu Lakmal, and Madhavi Perera, "Synergistic Union of Word2Vec and Lexicon for Domain Specific Semantic Similarity", in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS), 2017, pp. 1--6. doi: 10.1109/ICIINFS.2017.8300343
Dimuthu Upeksha, Chamila Wijayarathna, Maduranga Siriwardena, Lahiru Lasandun, Chinthana Wimalasuriya, N. H. N. D. de Silva, and Gihan Dias, "Comparison Between Performance of Various Database Systems for Implementing a Language Corpus", in International Conference: Beyond Databases, Architectures and Structures, May. 2015, pp. 82--91. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-18422-7_7
Dimuthu Upeksha, Chamila Wijayarathna, Maduranga Siriwardena, Lahiru Lasandun, Chinthana Wimalasuriya, N. H. N. D. De Silva, and Gihan Dias, "Implementing a Corpus for Sinhala Language", in Symposium on Language Technology for South Asia 2015, 2015. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23035.11047
S Lokanathan, N de Silva, G Kreindler, Y Miyauchi, and D Dhananjaya, "Using Mobile Network Big Data for Informing Transportation and Urban Planning in Colombo", Available at SSRN, November. 2014
White Papers
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and Nisansa de Silva, "Sinhala Language Corpora and Stopwords from a Decade of Sri Lankan Facebook", arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07884, 2020. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3650976
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Nisansa de Silva, and Yashothara Shanmugarajah, "Natural Language Processing for Government: Problems and Potential", LIRNEasia, 2019. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34297.31845
Preprints
Nisansa de Silva, "Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research", arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.02358, 2019. doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.1906.02358
Nisansa de Silva, Danaja Maldeniya, and Chamilka Wijeratne, "Subject Specific Stream Classification Preprocessing Algorithm for Twitter Data Stream", arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.09995, 2017. doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.1705.09995
Nisansa de Silva, "Sinhala Text Classification: Observations from the Perspective of a Resource Poor Language", , 2015
