Browsing by Author "Wasala, R.A."

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A Rule Based Syllabification Algorithm for Sinhala
(Lecture Notes in Computer Science/ IJCNLP: International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2005) Weerasinghe, A.R.; Wasala, R.A.; Gamage, K.N.
This paper presents a study of Sinhala syllable structure and an algorithm for identifying syllables in Sinhala words. After a thorough study of the Syllable structure and linguistic rules for syllabification of Sinhala words and a survey of the relevant literature, a set of rules was identified and implemented as a simple, easy-to-implement algorithm. The algorithm was tested using 30,000 distinct words obtained from a corpus and compared with the same words manually syllabified. The algorithm performs with 99.95 % accuracy.
Festival-si: A Sinhala Text-to-Speech System
(Lecture Notes in Computer Science/ IJCNLP: International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2007) Weerasinghe, A.R.; Wasala, R.A.; Gamage, K.N.
This paper brings together the development of the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for Sinhala using the Festival framework and practical applications of it. Construction of a diphone database and implementation of the natural language processing modules are described. The paper also presents the development methodology of direct Sinhala Unicode text input by rewriting Letter-to-Sound rules in Festival's context sensitive rule format and the implementation of Sinhala syllabification algorithm. A Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech and yielded a score of 71.5% for the TTS system described.
Sinhala Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion and Rules for Schwa Epenthesis
(Proceedings of the COLING/ACL Main Conference Poster Sessions, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006) Weerasinghe, A.R.; Wasala, R.A.; Gamage, K.N.
This paper describes an architecture to convert Sinhala Unicode text into phonemic specification of pronunciation. The study was mainly focused on disambiguating schwa-/\/ and /a/ vowel epenthesis for consonants, which is one of the significant problems found in Sinhala. This problem has been addressed by formulating a set of rules. The proposed set of rules was tested using 30,000 distinct words obtained from a corpus and com-pared with the same words manually transcribed to phonemes by an expert. The Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) con-version model achieves 98 % accuracy.