INTELLIGENT SINHALA QUESTION AND ANSWER SYSTEM BY INCORPORATING VISUAL CUES

Sinhala, the native language of the Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka, holds a promi- nent place within the Indo-European language tree. In addition, Sinhala has a rich history and is part of the Indo-Aryan language family, which is a subfamily of Indo-European. Considering Sinhala language importance, technology integra- tion into the education of college students is becoming increasingly important in today’s digital age. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop an intelligent Sinhala question and answer system by incorporating visual cues for college students.

The research aims to bridge the gap in technological resources for Sinhala language processing by developing an intelligent interactive Sinhala question and answer system. This robot system will utilize artificial intelligence technology to provide a user-friendly and efficient platform for college students to engage in conversation and communication in the Sinhala language. Students can ask questions in Sinhala language voice format by showing an object that is currently interacting and receiving responses from the robot in Sinhala language audio format, making the learning experience more interactive and immersive. This manages a local database for knowledge storage and retrieval to ensure that the robot has access to accurate and relevant information. Consider the contributions of this research to the field including the development of an interactive Sinhala question and answer program with the capability to adapt according to the con- text of the object and the development of an intelligent system for identifying the context based on objects available in the vision field. Then combine it with a question and answer program. Developing a Sinhala NLP model, Sinhala NLP Wordpiece tokenizer and developing Sinhala Dataset suitable for Sinhala NLP model are sub-contributions to Sinhala question and answer program.

The overall system architecture includes the integration of natural language processing, computer vision, and artificial intelligence techniques to create a comprehensive and intelligent Sinhala question and answer system for college students. Some following results of this research can show that the intelligent Sinhala question and answer system is an effective tool. When showing Banana to the robot and asking කෙසෙල් කියන්නේ මොනවද?, robot voice output will be පළතුරක්. Also when showing Spoon and asking හැන්ද හදලා තියෙන්නේ මොනවා වලින්ද? , robot voice output will be ලෝහ වලින්.

In conclusion, this research will contribute to the field of educational technol- ogy by exploring the application of artificial intelligence in language learning and communication. By developing an intelligent Sinhala question and answer sys- tem, college students will have access to a tool that can assist them in improving their knowledge and proficiency in the Sinhala language.

OVERALL SYSTEM DEMONSTRATION VIDEOS