Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research

Sinhala is the native language of the Sinhalese people who make up the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. The language belongs to the globe-spanning language tree, Indo-European. However, due to poverty in both linguistic and economic capital, Sinhala, in the perspective of Natural Language Processing tools and research, remains a resource-poor language which has neither the economic drive its cousin English has nor the sheer push of the law of numbers a language such as Chinese has. A number of research groups from Sri Lanka have noticed this dearth and the resultant dire need for proper tools and research for Sinhala natural language processing. However, due to various reasons, these attempts seem to lack coordination and awareness of each other. The objective of this paper is to fill that gap of a comprehensive literature survey of the publicly available Sinhala natural language tools and research so that the researchers working in this field can better utilize contributions of their peers. As such, we shall be uploading this paper to arXiv and perpetually update it periodically to reflect the advances made in the field

InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel Adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model's predicted label when it's not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Findings. Camera-ready versio

Automating Chalkboard support processes using a chatbot

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems, April 2019This project seeks to apply natural language processing techniques to automate the support processes of Chalkboard Education, a startup in Ghana. The company has many users but currently has only two operations personnel responsible for responding to customer queries. Their support processes can be made easier with the use of a chatbot. The project references work from early chatbots like ELIZA and Cleverbot as well as more recent ones like MOOCBuddy and SuperAgent. The chatbot is built on RASA Natural Language Interpreter and uses third party APIs like Twilio and Database connections to mirror human support processes. Upon implementation, the chatbot is suitably able to perform the repetitive human tasks the operations personnel were carrying out, successfully and in shorter time. In the event that the chatbot cannot handle a query, the problem is forwarded to the aforementioned operations personnel. Upon evaluation, it was discovered that the chatbot has could improve its accuracy and effectiveness with techniques such as adding more training data and using different language models for embeddings. In the future, the chatbot can be implemented via a USSD application to enable Chalkboard capitalize on the prevalence of USSD application in Africa.Ashesi Universit

Toward an affect-sensitive multimodal human-computer interaction

The ability to recognize affective states of a person... This paper argues that next-generation human-computer interaction (HCI) designs need to include the essence of emotional intelligence -- the ability to recognize a user's affective states -- in order to become more human-like, more effective, and more efficient. Affective arousal modulates all nonverbal communicative cues (facial expressions, body movements, and vocal and physiological reactions). In a face-to-face interaction, humans detect and interpret those interactive signals of their communicator with little or no effort. Yet design and development of an automated system that accomplishes these tasks is rather difficult. This paper surveys the past work in solving these problems by a computer and provides a set of recommendations for developing the first part of an intelligent multimodal HCI -- an automatic personalized analyzer of a user's nonverbal affective feedback

The politics, policies and progress of basic education in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is hailed internationally for her achievements in literacy, educational enrolment and equality of educational opportunity. However, progress has not been straightforward due to the complex interactions between politics, policy formulation, and the implementation of reforms. This dynamic process has often led to contradictory outcomes. This monograph describes and analyses the political drivers and context of educational reform from the colonial era to the present before an in-depth exploration of the origins and implementation of the comprehensive 1997 education reforms. Much of the evidence referring to the later period has been drawn from extensive interviews with 20 senior members of Sri Lanka’s education policy community. From 1931 to 1970 education policies were driven by the need to assert national control over an inherited colonial system and to create a unified system of education. Policy formation relied heavily on debate in public and in parliament, following practices of governance inherited from the former colonial master. The implementation of reforms was largely undertaken by bureaucrats and teachers without interference from politicians. This policy environment changed markedly during the 1970s as decisions regarding education came to be largely driven by the need to contain rising youth unrest. Debate was stifled both in the public domain and in parliament, and politicians became increasingly involved in the day-to-day practices of education, especially those concerning teacher transfers. The 1997 education reforms were comprehensive, including programmes to ensure universal access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. They attracted considerable ‘political will’, a vague but much vaunted term in the international policy discourse. Yet, despite seemingly high levels of national political will, reform has not been plain sailing. School rationalisation has been impeded by community resistance and by bureaucratic demands insensitive to local conditions and cost constraints. The reforms in junior secondary education have been inhibited by weak leadership, lack of planning, heavy curriculum demands, and the absence of a pilot programme. The monograph explores the connections between the political and technical drivers and inhibitors of reform in practice and argues that low-level, as well as high-level political will, has played an active part in determining whether formulated policies are translated into action on the ground. Bi-partisan support for education policy is essential if implementation is to endure

Anti-Russia or anti-Ukraine: How do Twitter users feel about the ongoing conflict between August 2022 and February 2023? A sentiment analysis approach

The research presented in this thesis aimed to investigate the shifting sentiment among Twitter users regarding the Ukraine-Russia conflict between August 2022 and February 2023. To comprehend this sentiment variation and public opinion, we travelled back to 1991, the year of the Soviet Union's dissolution, and reviewed literature to gain deeper insights into the Ukraine-Russia relationship. Employing a combination of descriptive analysis techniques, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modelling, and Machine Learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, AdaBoost, and XGBoost, we examined the evolving Anti-Ukraine and Anti-Russia sentiments expressed by Twitter users during the second semester of the conflict. Our findings revealed that, within our datasets, there was a higher prevalence of tweets expressing Anti-Ukraine sentiments than those expressing Anti-Russia sentiments. Notably, the XGBoost model exhibited the most promising performance metrics, achieving an accuracy rate of 90% for the dataset with data from August and September 2022 and 93% accuracy for the dataset with data from February 2023.A investigação apresentada nesta tese teve como objetivo analisar a evolução do sentimento dos utilizadores do Twitter face ao conflito Ucrânia-Rússia entre agosto de 2022 e fevereiro de 2023. Para melhor compreender esta evolução de sentimento e da opinião pública, pesquisámos literatura relativa às relações entre a Ucrânia e a Rússia desde 1991, o ano da dissolução da União Soviética. Utilizando uma combinação de técnicas de análise descritiva, Análise de Sentimento, Topic Modelling e algoritmos de Machine Learning, como Regressão Logística, Árvore de Decisão, Naïve Bayes, AdaBoost e XGBoost, analisámos a evolução dos sentimentos Anti-Ucrânia e Anti-Rússia expressos pelos utilizadores do Twitter durante o segundo semestre do conflito. Concluímos que, dentro dos nossos conjuntos de dados, existe uma maior prevalência de tweets que expressam sentimentos Anti-Ucrânia em comparação com sentimentos Anti-Rússia. O modelo XGBoost apresentou as melhores métricas de performance, com uma taxa de accuracy de 90% para o dataset com dados de agosto e setembro de 2022 e uma taxa de accucary de 93% para o dataset com dados de fevereiro de 2023

Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger

This peer-reviewed collection brings together the latest research on language endangerment and language rights. It creates a vibrant, interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the most pertinent and urgent topics central to vitality and equality of languages in today’s globalised world. The novelty of the volume lies in the multifaceted view on the variety of dangers that languages face today, such as extinction through dwindling speaker populations and lack of adequate preservation policies or inequality in different social contexts (e.g. access to justice, education and research resources). There are examples of both loss and survival, and discussion of multiple factors that condition these two different outcomes. We pose and answer difficult questions such as whether forced interventions in preventing loss are always warranted or indeed viable. The emerging shared perspective is that of hope to inspire action towards improving the position of different languages and their speakers through research of this kind

The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity

What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives