MACHINE PROCESSING OF SINHALA NATURAL LANGUAGE: A STEP TOWARD INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

An intelligent machine can be thought of as a human friendly machine system that identifies or understands the problems of generating tasks, developing plans, compiling and executing the tasks automatically. High performance dependable intelligent systems must understand and translate natural languages. The translation of natural languages for intelligent systems has been one of the most challenging problems in intelligent systems from the very beginning. It is the responsibility of a translation system to assign the responsibility of task generation ability of the machine to automate a program generation.

In this paper, the problem of advanced machine translation capabilities is approached by examining the Sinhala natural language. Sinhalese has not been analyzed using computational linguistics. Our earlier system on Sinhalese morphology is the first attempt of such a study. This paper extends it to syntactic and semantic analysis. We formalize grammar rules for unit, phrase, clause and sentence, and developed a semantically characteristic Sinhalese dictionary, and a conceptual dictionary based on English, Japanese, and Sinhalese. Syntactic and semantic analyses are implemented on the computer and sound experimental results are obtained.