Last Wednesday I got to present my paper titled ‘Morpholocal Parser for Sinhala verbs’ at IITC, BMICH. It was based on my undergrad thesis… which I realized I’d almost forgotton about on the morning of the presentation!

Anyway I was originally planning to go to office and leave for bmich by 12 but I had this panic attack that I didnt remember anything I was gonna talk about so I decided to take the whole day off 🙁 And spent till like 11.20 poring over the slides at home.

So to cut a long stressful story short I went there by 12.15 but spent 15 more minutes trying to find ‘Commitee Room A’. Those people at the front sent me a regular ‘Parangiya Kotte giya vage’ tour around the darned bmich. At noon in Colombo this sort of excursion can make you really annoyed. And all this in a sari!!#$??##

My presentation was under ‘Localization and Local Language Processing Applications’ and was to be the last of the session which was about at 3pm. After that Black Magic thingie they served for lunch I was pretty de-stressed and relaxed so the presentation went OK.

Here’s the abstract of my paper if you’re interested:
“This paper presents a morphological parser capable of analyzing and generating Sinhala verbs. Morphological analysis and generation plays a vital role in many applications related to natural language processing, such as spell checkers, grammar checkers, intelligent information retrieval, machine translation and other complex applications. The parser consists of a lexicon of more than 400 verb stems and handles 45 inflectional rules for each stem. Analyses produces the verb stem together with its feature tags depicting verb class, person, number, tense, gender, mood, voice, etc. The parser is modelled in the framework of two level morphology model using Xerox finite state morphology tools. To our knowledge, this is the first such parser for Sinhala verbs.

Keywords: Morphology, Natural Language Processing, Parsing, Sinhala
”

I was dissapointed with the turnout though. Maybe because it was the last day of the conference..But it was nice to be told that your research was interesting and that people were impressed! which I was told by 2 total strangers during tea 🙂 Since your collegues would say this to you anyway coz they’re just being nice it was good to hear it from strangers 😀

But the nicest part came while I was on my way back to the office to catch my transport… Several of my friends texted me to tell me that they had watched the whole thing on internet (UCSC tv)! Too bad I didn’t know about that before..Hmm on second thought better that I didn’t know..Would’ve freaked out probably!