SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0

TL;DR

SiDiaC-v.2.0 is the largest Sinhala diachronic corpus, covering texts from 1800 to 1955 CE, with extensive filtering, annotation, and categorization to support NLP research in a low-resource language.

Contribution

This paper introduces SiDiaC-v.2.0, a comprehensive, well-processed Sinhala corpus with detailed genre annotations, expanding resources for Sinhala NLP and historical language analysis.

Findings

Largest Sinhala diachronic corpus to date

Includes 244k words from 185 literary works

Annotated subset with 70k words for research use

Abstract

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 244k 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 70k 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.