Swa Bhasha 2.0: Addressing Ambiguities in Romanized Sinhala to Native Sinhala Transliteration Using Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

With the growing popularity of social media and instantaneous messaging, it is more important than ever to interact online in your native language. In Sinhala, both Romanized and native Sinhala are widely used. Due to the informal textual abbreviation known as “Singlish” however, attempts to translate Romanized Sinhala into native Sinhala via machine transliteration may result in errors. Rule-based transliteration systems may not be compatible with the ad hoc transliterations used in Singlish. To translate Romanized Sinhala back precisely and consistently into Native Sinhala, a novel NMT approach has been proposed. To address the complexities of casual Romanized Sinhala, a hybrid strategy combining rule-based and neural machine translation has been proposed. This strategy aims to eliminate word selection ambiguity by selecting the best word suggestions from a pool of predicted words using a suggestion algorithm. Combining the advantages of Suggestion algorithms and neural machine translation, the proposed transliterator has the potential to considerably enhance reverse transliteration and improve communication in native Sinhala by combining the strengths of both approaches. After completing the GRU model, the performance of the machine translation models on the BLEU test improved to 0.8, indicating high word-level translation accuracy. Significant potential exists for the proposed transliterator to enhance reverse transliteration and improve communication in Sinhala. While preliminary test results are promising, additional testing and refinement are required to improve the overall efficacy of machine translation models.