Widanalage Mario Yomal De Mel
2025
Sinhala Transliteration: A Comparative Analysis Between Rule-based and Seq2Seq Approaches
Widanalage Mario Yomal De Mel
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Kasun Imesha Wickramasinghe
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Nisansa de Silva
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Surangika Dayani Ranathunga
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages
Due to reasons of convenience and lack of tech literacy, transliteration (i.e., Romanizing native scripts instead of using localization tools) is eminently prevalent in the context of low-resource languages such as Sinhala, which have their own writing script. In this study, our focus is on Romanized Sinhala transliteration. We propose two methods to address this problem: Our baseline is a rule-based method, which is then compared against our second method where we approach the transliteration problem as a sequence-to-sequence task akin to the established Neural Machine Translation (NMT) task. For the latter, we propose a Transformer based Encode-Decoder solution. We witnessed that the Transformer-based method could grab many ad-hoc patterns within the Romanized scripts compared to the rule-based method.