Analysis system for Sinhalese unit structure

Abstract Sinhalese is the major language in Sri Lanka, spoken by 15 million people. It has never been analysed by a computer. The paper describes an original computational linguistic analysis for Sinhalese. A machine representation of Sinhalese script is developed. It provides an easy means of input and facilitates the formalization of the linking phenomena. An analysis sytem for Sinhalese morphology is developed. A Sinhalese sentence consists of a few units separated by spaces. The unit structure is formalized as a root and suffixes. Connection rules and linking rules are developed. The grammatical features of a unit are characterized by a set of attributes, and a mechanism to compute these attributes is developed from the features of the root and suffixes. The unit structure involves much important grammatical information such as case and attributes. The analyser can handle any kind of Sinhalese unit efficiently. The system will be used as the base for machine processing of Sinhalese, its syntactic and ...