Chamila Liyanage


2024

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CHAMUÇA: Towards a Linked Data Language Resource of Portuguese Borrowings in Asian Languages
Fahad Khan | Ana Salgado | Isuri Anuradha | Rute Costa | Chamila Liyanage | John P. McCrae | Atul Kumar Ojha | Priya Rani | Francesca Frontini
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics @ LREC-COLING 2024

This paper presents the development of CHAMUÇA, a novel lexical resource designed to document the influence of the Portuguese language on various Asian languages, with an initial focus on the languages of South Asia. Through the utilization of linked open data and the OntoLex vocabulary, CHAMUÇA offers structured insights into the linguistic characteristics, and cultural ramifications of Portuguese borrowings across multiple languages. The article outlines CHAMUÇA’s potential contributions to the linguistic linked data community, emphasising its role in addressing the scarcity of resources for lesser-resourced languages and serving as a test case for organising etymological data in a queryable format. CHAMUÇA emerges as an initiative towards the comprehensive catalogization and analysis of Portuguese borrowings, offering valuable insights into language contact dynamics, historical evolution, and cultural exchange in Asia, one that is based on linked data technology.

2023

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Sinhala Dependency Treebank (STB)
Chamila Liyanage | Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran | Thilini Nadungodage | Randil Pushpananda
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)

This paper reports the development of the first dependency treebank for the Sinhala language (STB). Sinhala, which is morphologically rich, is a low-resource language with few linguistic and computational resources available publicly. This treebank consists of 100 sentences taken from a large contemporary written text corpus. These sentences were annotated manually according to the Universal Dependencies framework. In this paper, apart from elaborating on the approach that has been followed to create the treebank, we have also discussed some interesting syntactic constructions found in the corpus and how we have handled them using the current Universal Dependencies specification.