Browsing by Author "Wickramasinghe, R.I.P."

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An Analysis of the Prevailing Statistics Education in Sri Lanka and Feasible Solutions to Uplift it
(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Wickramasinghe, R.I.P.; Indralingm, M.
Teaching statistics has not been an easy task in comparison with other disciplines. This is the common complain made by most of the teachers at all levels who teach statistics in Sri Lanka. Though the situation is such, it seems that no concrete steps have been taken to change the acute situation. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze the prevailing difficulties in statistics education in Sri Lanka and to find feasible solutions to improve the situation to a higher level. As the entire statistics education is a broad one, and the preliminary statistics education has a direct impact on other levels of statistics education, in this paper the attention is given to discuss the preliminary statistics education in Sri Lanka. The initial attempt is to discuss and analyze the ongoing statistics education system in Sri Lanka. Those colonial methods of teaching that does not improve the level of the statistics education are also identified. The next step is to identify some strategies that are affordable as well as feasible. The aim of these new strategies is to create active teaching and active learning participation which cannot be seen in the colonial statistics education system. Non-technological strategies and new technological strategies are discussed and suitable arrangements are made to alter those technological strategies to suit Sri Lankan education system. Among the new technological strategies, an attention is given to introduce web media, multimedia and other techniques such as computer animations in this teaching process. In addition to those solutions, it is also suggested to eliminate the language barrier which is a one of the main obstacle to improve the level of statistics education in Sri Lanka.
Food web: an interactive software for quantifying Wine miller’s trophic networks in fish communities
(Sri Lanka Association for Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, 2004) Weliange, W.S.; Wickramasinghe, R.I.P.; Kumara, K.H.; de Silva, C.; Amarasinghe, U.S.; Vijverberg, J.
Observed properties of aquatic food webs have important management implications as well as important theoretical implications in the subjects of fisheries science and aquatic ecology. The food web approach is useful to understand pathways of energy and material transfer and the structure of the hierarchy of species trophic interactions in aquatic ecosystems. Winemiller (1990) presented a graphical method to investigate spatial and temporal variation in trophic networks in tropical fish communities. A computer programme was developed to produce graphic illustrations of trophic networks in the fish communities and associated food web parameters namely number of nodes, compartmentalization, connectance, average number of prey per node, average number of predators per node and ratio of consumer nodes to total nodes. The input data for this software are relative importance of food items of constituent species in the fish community and the tropic levels of prey items. The graphic illustrations and associated food web parameters mentioned above can be used for spatial and temporal comparison of trophic relationships in fish communities.
Practical Issues in the Development of TTS and SR For The Sinhala Language
(University of Kelaniya, 2007) Wickramasinghe, R.I.P.; Kumara, K. H.; Dias, N.G.J.
In this study, discussed some issues that are arising in the development of Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech Recognition (SR) systems for the Sinhala language are discussed. There are numerous benefits of TTS and SR to Sinhala community. In the context of Sinhala language, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies are in the primary stage in comparison with other languages such as English, French, German, Japanese etc. Since current TTS and SR development environments are far from being language independent, the existing systems cannot be adopted directly to the Sinhala language. This contribution outlines problematic areas that come across in the development of TTS and SR systems for Sinhala language. While discussing those problems, some of the possible solution strategies for both TTS and SR development have been formulated.
Translation of a Given Simple English Sentence into its Equivalent in Sinhala using a Speech Synthesizer
(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Wickramasinghe, R.I.P.; Kumara, H.M.; Dias, N.G.J.
Machine Translation (MT) or Automatic Translation is generally concern about automating all or part of the process of translating one human language to another language. These human or natural languages bear similarities as well as differences due to the way these languages have organized. Therefore, translating from one natural language into another natural language depends on their vocabulary, grammar, and conceptual structure. The translation Text-To-Speech (TTS) can be considered as the automatic production of speech, through a grapheme-to-phoneme transcription of the sentences to utter. To our knowledge there is no such a system in Sri Lanka that could translate simple English sentences into its equivalent in Sinhala with the relevant speech synthesis. In a country like Sri Lanka where the language barrier is a major issue, this type of systems will definitely help to reduce these language problems. With language translation coupled with TTS synthesis would be a good Computer Aided Learning Technique, that will provide a tool to learn English effectively. This paper discusses an approach to translation with a speech synthesizer of a given simple English sentence into its Sinhala equivalent. The problem of translation is handled in two phases, namely the lexical selection, where appropriate target-language lexical items are chosen for each source-language lexical item and then the lexical reordering, where the chosen target-language lexical items are arranged to produce a meaningful target language string. Together with translator, here we use the concatenative synthesizer which is embedded in the speech units to be chained up. In our speech synthesizer, speech units that are typically smaller than words are used to synthesize speech from arbitrary input text. Speech units are algorithmically extracted from a phonetically transcribed speech data set. The unit selection process involves a combinatorial search over the entire speech corpus using the search algorithms. Due to the practical difficulties and complexities this translation and TTS is tested only for the simple English sentences in which only SVO (Subject/Verb/Object) structure can be seen.