PhD (Moratuwa), BSc Eng. (Hons) (Moratuwa)
Keywords: Natural Language Processing | Machine Learning / Deep Learning | Sinhala | Low-resource Languages | Parallel Corpora | Parallel Data Curation | Cross-lingual Representations | Data Augmentation |
Dissertations
W.A.S.A Fernando, "Data Augmentation to Induce High Quality Parallel Data for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation", University of Moratuwa, 2025
Conference Papers
Aloka Fernando, Nisansa de Silva, Menan Velayuthan, Charitha Rathnayaka, and Surangika Ranathunga, "Improving the quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics", in Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2025, pp. 28252--28269. doi: 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1435
Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Dilith Jayakody, and Aloka Fernando, "Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Research", in Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024.
Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Menan Velayuthan, Aloka Fernando, and Charitha Rathnayake, "Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora", in Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), St. Julian{'}s, Malta: Association for Computational Linguistics, 03. 2024, pp. 860--880. 
Workshop Papers
Menan Velayuthan, Dilith Jayakody, Nisansa de Silva, Aloka Fernando, and Surangika Ranathunga, "Back to the Stats: Rescuing Low Resource Neural Machine Translation with Statistical Methods", in Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, 2024, pp. 901--907. doi: 10.18653/v1/2024.wmt-1.87
Preprints
Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva, Aloka Fernando, Kavindu Warnakulasuriya, Isuru Wijesiri, Menan Velayuthan, Charitha Rathnayaka, Thivaharan Varatharajan, Sajeevi Silva, Piumi Kandanaarachchi, and Uthayasanker Thayasivam, "EnSiTa-A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translation", ResearchGate, 2026
ActivePI: 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.
ActivePI: Surangika Ranathunga
We propose to create a multi-domain Neural Machine Translation (NMT) System for Sinhala, Tamil, and English, the official languages of Sri Lanka.
ActivePI: 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.
ActivePI: 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.
