# SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10861/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08523/) (2022)
- [Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02358/) (2019)
- [RuSemShift: a dataset of historical lexical semantic change in Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06436/) (2020)
- [A State-of-the-Art of Semantic Change Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09872/) (2018)
- [Three-part diachronic semantic change dataset for Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08294/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot OCR Accuracy of Low-Resourced Languages: A Comparative Analysis on Sinhala and Tamil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18264/) (2025)
- [Sinhala Language Corpora and Stopwords from a Decade of Sri Lankan Facebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07884/) (2020)
- [Sinhala Transliteration: A Comparative Analysis Between Rule-based and Seq2Seq Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00529/) (2024)
- [Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05760/) (2019)
- [An open diachronic corpus of historical Spanish: annotation criteria and automatic modernisation of spelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.3692/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Trilingual Topic Modeling of Sri Lankan Parliamentary Debates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20365/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

SiDiaC-v.2.0 is the largest comprehensive Sinhala Diachronic Corpus to date, covering a period from 1800 CE to 1955 CE in terms of publication dates, and a historical span from the 5th to the 20th century CE in terms of written dates. The corpus consists of 229k words across 185 literary works that underwent thorough filtering, preprocessing, and copyright compliance checks, followed by extensive post-processing. Additionally, a subset of 59 documents totalling 65k words was annotated based on their written dates. Texts from the National Library of Sri Lanka were selected from the SiDiaC-v.1.0 non-filtered list, which was digitised using Google Document AI OCR. This was followed by post-processing to correct formatting issues, address code-mixing, include special tokens, and fix malformed tokens. The construction of SiDiaC-v.2.0 was informed by practices from other corpora, such as FarPaHC, SiDiaC-v.1.0, and CCOHA. This was particularly relevant for syntactic annotation and text normalisation strategies, given the shared characteristics of low-resource language status between Faroese and the similar cleaning strategies utilised in CCOHA. This corpus is categorised into two layers based on genres: primary and secondary. The primary categorisation is binary, assigning each book to either Non-Fiction or Fiction. The secondary categorisation is more detailed, grouping texts under specific genres such as Religious, History, Poetry, Language, and Medical. Despite facing challenges due to limited resources, SiDiaC-v.2.0 serves as a comprehensive resource for Sinhala NLP, building upon the work previously done in SiDiaC-v.1.0.