# Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08523/) (2022)
- [BERTifying Sinhala -- A Comprehensive Analysis of Pre-trained Language Models for Sinhala Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07864/) (2022)
- [Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07446/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot OCR Accuracy of Low-Resourced Languages: A Comparative Analysis on Sinhala and Tamil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18264/) (2025)
- [SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09115/) (2025)
- [NSINA: A News Corpus for Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16571/) (2024)
- [Sinhala Transliteration: A Comparative Analysis Between Rule-based and Seq2Seq Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00529/) (2024)
- [Sinhala-English Parallel Word Dictionary Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02234/) (2023)
- [Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06021/) (2024)
- [Seeking Sinhala Sentiment: Predicting Facebook Reactions of Sinhala Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00468/) (2021)
- [SiTSE: Sinhala Text Simplification Dataset and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01293/) (2024)
- [IndoNLP 2025: Shared Task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05816/) (2025)
- [Improving the quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19074/) (2025)
- [Sentiment Analysis with Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study on a Decade of Sinhala Language Facebook Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03941/) (2022)
- [Data Augmentation to Address Out-of-Vocabulary Problem in Low-Resource Sinhala-English Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08722/) (2022)
- [Sinhala Sentence Embedding: A Two-Tiered Structure for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14472/) (2022)
- [Linguistic Analysis of Sinhala YouTube Comments on Sinhala Music Videos: A Dataset Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18633/) (2025)
- [SiDiaC: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17912/) (2025)
- [Sinhala-English Word Embedding Alignment: Introducing Datasets and Benchmark for a Low Resource Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10436/) (2023)
- [A Multi-way Parallel Named Entity Annotated Corpus for English, Tamil and Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02056/) (2024)
- [Linguistic Entity Masking to Improve Cross-Lingual Representation of Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05700/) (2025)
- [GeeSanBhava: Sentiment Tagged Sinhala Music Video Comment Data Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18146/) (2025)
- [SinFoS: A Parallel Dataset for Translating Sinhala Figures of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09866/) (2026)
- [SinhaLegal: A Benchmark Corpus for Information Extraction and Analysis in Sinhala Legislative Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04854/) (2026)
- [SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10861/) (2026)
- [Separate Before You Compress: The WWHO Tokenization Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25309/) (2026)
- [grapheme-kit: Grapheme-Level Metrics and Text Processing for Multilingual NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22456/) (2026)
- [EnSiTa - A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29511/) (2026)
- [Subasa - Adapting Language Models for Low-resourced Offensive Language Detection in Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02178/) (2025)
- [Swa-bhasha Resource Hub: Romanized Sinhala to Sinhala Transliteration Systems and Data Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09245/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.