A Parser for Sinhala Language - First Step Towards English to Sinhala Machine Translation

Abstract

Sinhala language parser has been developed as the first step towards English to Sinhala natural language translation. The Sinhala parsing system comprises of a Sinhal a morphological analyzer that connects with three dictionaries, namely, base dictionary, rule dictionary and concept dictionary. The morphological analyzer of the parsing system implements inflection and derivation rules of the Sinhala grammar, and provides grammatical information of the words to be considered by the parser. The current version of the parser is capable of handling simple and complex sentences of Sinhala language. The entire system has been developed using Java and SWI-Prolog that runs on both Linux and Windows