Sinhala-English Parallel Word Dictionary Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces three open-source English-Sinhala parallel word dictionaries to support multilingual NLP tasks for this low-resource language, addressing the lack of such datasets.

Contribution

The work provides the first free, open, and publicly available parallel English-Sinhala word dictionaries, along with creation methodology and quality verification.

Findings

Datasets facilitate multilingual NLP for Sinhala-English tasks.

Experimental results confirm dataset quality and usability.

Resources are publicly accessible for research use.

Abstract

Parallel datasets are vital for performing and evaluating any kind of multilingual task. However, in the cases where one of the considered language pairs is a low-resource language, the existing top-down parallel data such as corpora are lacking in both tally and quality due to the dearth of human annotation. Therefore, for low-resource languages, it is more feasible to move in the bottom-up direction where finer granular pairs such as dictionary datasets are developed first. They may then be used for mid-level tasks such as supervised multilingual word embedding alignment. These in turn can later guide higher-level tasks in the order of aligning sentence or paragraph text corpora used for Machine Translation (MT). Even though more approachable than generating and aligning a massive corpus for a low-resource language, for the same reason of apathy from larger research entities, even these finer granular data sets are lacking for some low-resource languages. We have observed that there is no free and open dictionary data set for the low-resource language, Sinhala. Thus, in this work, we introduce three parallel English-Sinhala word dictionaries (En-Si-dict-large, En-Si-dict-filtered, En-Si-dict-FastText) which help in multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks related to English and Sinhala languages. In this paper, we explain the dataset creation pipeline as well as the experimental results of the tests we have carried out to verify the quality of the data sets. The data sets and the related scripts are available at https://github.com/kasunw22/sinhala-para-dict.