Swa-Bhasha: Romanized Sinhala to Sinhala Reverse Transliteration using a Hybrid Approach

Abstract

With the social and technological revolution, the usage of social media platforms and instant message services strengthens native language compatibility in the digital arena. The Sinhala and the Romanized Sinhala became the prominent typing languages among the general Sri Lankan community. Informal short-hand-based typing and short net acronyms were used for easier Sinhala typing. But Typing Romanized Sinhala using ad-hoc transliterations and getting the expected output in native Sinhala is less accurate and time-consuming. Therefore, this study aims to introduce a novel reverse transliterator which can back transliterate and suggest Romanized Sinhala to Sinhala words. The Transliterator has been modelled using the Statistical approach with Trigram and Rule-based model for back transliteration purposes and Knowledge-based with a Trie data structure for suggesting purposes. The proposed solution is capable of transliterating both formal and informal shorthand Romanized Sinhala. This hybrid model used in the study is capable of efficient transliteration with the word level accuracy of 0.84. This proposed model can be used in digital platforms to enhance the usability of native Sinhala communication in a much more efficient way.