overview

The National Languages Processing Center (NLPC)

The National Languages Processing Center was established to enable Sinhala and Tamil, the national languages of Sri Lanka, to fully benefit from current and future computing and communication technologies. Our center comprises a team of experts and research students from different institutions in the country who focus on areas such as Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics.

Our work ranges from basic research in computational linguistics for Sinhala and Tamil, to key applications in human language technology for the two languages, as well as English. We make use of cutting edge technologies, and tailor them according to the needs of our local languages.  We are currently developing language and linguistic resources, as well as basic language processing tools such as parts of speech (POS) taggers and morphological analysers. We make these tools publicly available, in the expectation that it would further research initiatives for our local languages. Our key application is Si-Ta, the Sinhala-Tamil translation system for official government documents, which is currently being used by some government organizations.