Sandun Sameera Perera


2025

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Machine Translation and Transliteration for Indo-Aryan Languages: A Systematic Review
Sandun Sameera Perera | Deshan Koshala Sumanathilaka
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages

This systematic review paper provides an overview of recent machine translation and transliteration developments for Indo-Aryan languages spoken by a large population across South Asia. The paper examines advancements in translation and transliteration systems for a few language pairs which appear in recently published papers. The review summarizes the current state of these technologies, providing a worthful resource for anyone who is doing research in these fields to understand and find existing systems and techniques for translation and transliteration.

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IndoNLP 2025 Shared Task: Romanized Sinhala to Sinhala Reverse Transliteration Using BERT
Sandun Sameera Perera | Lahiru Prabhath Jayakodi | Deshan Koshala Sumanathilaka | Isuri Anuradha
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages

The Romanized text has become popular with the growth of digital communication platforms, largely due to the familiarity with English keyboards. In Sri Lanka, Romanized Sinhala, commonly referred to as “Singlish” is widely used in digital communications. This paper introduces a novel context-aware back-transliteration system designed to address the ad-hoc typing patterns and lexical ambiguity inherent in Singlish. The proposed system com bines dictionary-based mapping for Singlish words, a rule-based transliteration for out of-vocabulary words and a BERT-based language model for addressing lexical ambiguities. Evaluation results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach, achieving high BLEU scores along with low Word Error Rate (WER) and Character Error Rate (CER) across test datasets. This study provides an effective solution for Romanized Sinhala back-transliteration and establishes the foundation for improving NLP tools for similar low-resourced languages.