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: 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
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.
Theses: BSc
Chiran Chathuranga, Eranga Mapa, Lasitha Wattaladeniya, and Samith Dassanayake, "SELCHI: Travel Profiling", University of Moratuwa, 2014
Journal Papers
W M Yomal De Mel and Nisansa de Silva, "Linguistic Analysis of Sinhala YouTube Comments on Sinhala Music Videos: A Dataset Study", ICTer, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 121-130, 2025. doi: 10.4038/icter.v18i2.7299
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
Eranga Mapa, Lasitha Wattaladeniya, Chiran Chathuranga, Samith Dassanayake, Nisansa de Silva, Upali Kohomban, and Danaja Maldeniya, "Text Normalization in Social Media by using Spell Correction and Dictionary Based Approach", Systems Learning, vol. 1, pp. 1--6, 2012
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 Assisted Deep Contextual Modeling for Automatic Rumor Detection in Social Networks", in Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, 2021, pp. 405--415. doi: 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.31
Preprints
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
