Common Sense Reasoning
PI: Surangika Ranathunga
The Common Sense Reasoning project focuses on advancing culturally grounded evaluation and knowledge representation for language-based artificial intelligence systems.
Projects
Data Quality Estimation and Improvement
PI: Surangika Ranathunga
The Data Quality Estimation and Improvement project focuses on analysing, measuring, and enhancing the quality of datasets used in natural language processing, particularly for multilingual and low-resource language applications.
Knowledge Representation
PI: Nisansa de Silva
The Knowledge Representation project investigates methods for structuring, aligning, and reasoning over knowledge extracted from language, with particular emphasis on low-resource settings, domain-specific semantics, and intelligent information access.
Low-Resource Adaptation for NLP
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.
Sinhala Language Resources
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.
Text Summarization
PI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to advance automatic summarization and generation techniques, with a focus on aspect-aware methods that capture fine-grained information and sentiment within concise textual representations.
People
Publications
Theses: MSc Minor Component Research
Kasun Wickramasinghe, "Bilingual Lexicon Induction for the Sinhala-English Language Pair", University of Moratuwa, 2024
Journal Papers
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
Conference Papers
Imalsha Puranegedara, Themira Chathumina, Nisal Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Surangika Ranathunga, and Mokanarangan Thayaparan, "Utilizing Multilingual Encoders to Improve Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages", in Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon), 2025. doi: 10.1109/MERCon67903.2025.11216992
Kushan Hewapathirana, Nisansa de Silva, and C D Athuraliya, "M2DS: Multilingual Dataset for Multi-document Summarisation", in International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, 2024, pp. 219--231. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-70248-8_17
Kasun Wickramasinghe and Nisansa de Silva, "Sinhala-English Parallel Word Dictionary Dataset", in 2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS), 2023, pp. 61--66. doi: 10.1109/ICIIS58898.2023.10253560
Preprints
Tyler A Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Abdelrahman Sadallah, Abeer Kashar, Abolade Daud, Abosede Grace Olanihun, Adamu Labaran Mohammed, Adeyemi Praise, Adhikarinayum Meerajita Sharma, and others, "Global PIQA: Evaluating Physical Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures", arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.24081, 2025