Symposia & Conferences
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Item A Study on the Utility of Hierarchical Phrase-Based Model for Low Resource Languages.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Shanmugarasa, Y.; Thayasivam, U.With the rebellion of internet, people got more opportunities to go global. There is the issue of communication, which is made more challenging due to difference in languages. English is the generally spoken language and there is no assurance that everyone is proficient in it. Therefore, translation plays a major role. Currently, South Asian languages are dominantly translated using traditional statistical and neural machine translation approaches. South Asian languages lack necessary natural language resources and tools, hence are classified as low resourced languages. This limits the effectiveness achievable in machine translation of those languages. Compared to English language, South Asian languages are morphologically rich and are commonly used in different sentence structures. For example, the structure of a sentence is subject-verb-object in English while it is subject-object-verb in most South Asian languages. As official languages of Sri Lanka are low resourced, when it is used to translate using traditional statistical machine translation, it is impossible to produce sentences with acceptable sentence structure because of sub-phrases which can only be reordered using distortion reordering model, are independent of their context. In addition, using phrases longer than three words barely improves the translation because such phrases are infrequent in the corpora due to data sparsity. To overcome this problem hierarchical phrase model translation, which uses grammar rules formed by the Synchronous Context Free Grammar, can be used. Moses is selected to build the baseline system. In the experiments, the system used 50000 parallel sentences for Tamil and English. Using BLEU as a metric, the hierarchical phrase-based model achieves 3.42 for Tamil to English translation and 1.73 for vice-versa. This score improves 0.72 from traditional approach. For Sinhala to Tamil, it achieves 11.18 and 10.73 for vice-versa. Moreover, the system could further be improved by establishing certain rules.Item A Research on Applying the 'Liushu Theory' on Teaching Chinese Characters to Sri Lankan Student.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Fernando, K. D. K. D. T.Starting from the year 2004, the students who are learning Chinese in Sri Lanka have gradually increased. Among the problems observed among the learners, the main problem was the inadequacy of study resources including Chinese books, articles and research books for the students who learned Chinese. Specially, there was a less amount of books and other academic material related to Chinese language. Therefore, the teachers used various methods including writing on the black board, reading characters, explaining the meaning of the words, and giving homework in teaching. Because of the use of traditional teaching methods, which were rather ineffective in the classrooms, the learning process was impeded and the students lacked extensive knowledge on Chinese language. To overcome this issue, a theory called “liu shu” was introduced, which was specially created for the Sri Lankan students. The theory was first implemented in University of Kelaniya, where 2 groups, each consisting of 25 students who are learning Chinese in first year were selected for the experiment. One group was taught according the method “liu shu”, and the other according to the current traditional teaching methods. After two months, an examination was held to evaluate the students. It was observed that the lowest marks obtained the group taught according to the “liu shu” method was higher than the highest mark obtained by the other group. Therefore it was concluded that using the method “liu shu” one can ascertain how to write correct Chinese characters, how to pronounce Chinese characters correctly, how to improve the knowledge of the history of Chinese, tradition and culture of Chinese and the civilization of Chinese better than when using traditional teaching methodologies. Further, as a result of that research, eight new methods of teaching Chinese were created, which highlight the importance of the method as an improved and effective learning as well as a teaching method.Item Problems associated with the use of Communicative Language Teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Kariyawasam, K.B.G.W.S.New language teachers have shifted to adopt the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach after noticing the failure of form focusing approach in developing learners' communicative ability in real life situations. CLT method has been identified as the functional approach. The rationale of the CLT approach is that the teacher should act as a facilitator to create a student-centered classroom and engage learners in authentic-like and meaningful communications with the goal to increase comprehensible language input for learners, expecting them to generate more output. If the target of foreign language teaching is to use the language, CLT seems to be an ideal teaching model. The aim of this study was to find out the difficulties faced by teachers in using CLT method in teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka (UOKSL). Data were collected from the Chinese language teachers at UOKSL by a using questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and class room observations. Results depict that indoor class room environment and a large number of students of the classes may lead to the failure of CLT. Awareness of these problems and the possible remedies such as small group classes, outdoor activities can be helpful for both CFL teachers and learners, providing them with insightful ideas about how to manage their teaching and learning activities for the successful implementation of this method.Item Improving English though Participating in University Student Organizations.(English Language Teaching Unit, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Ponnamperuma, P.; Ruwandika, K.; Devindi, T.English has become the de facto language of communication in the academia and the language that some of the student organizations operate in. These student organizations operate networking all universities in and outside Sri Lanka. The aim of this study is to see whether undergraduates actually improve their English knowledge by participation in student originations. For this purpose, a sample of 30 students were given questionnaires with two open ended questions asking about their views on improving English knowledge through participating in student organizations. For this purpose three student organizations, AISEC, Gavel club and Model United Nations (MUN) were selected. The participants were selected through purposive sampling; those who are members of one or more of the aforementioned student organizations. The results elaborate that although students use English, there is much code switching and it is difficult to identify if they really improve their English through participation in these organizations. In conclusion, a more comprehensive study would help to have a better understanding of this phenomenon.