Abstract:
Statistical machine translation method is one of the most promising and efficient method to perform machine
translation for Sri Lankan languages likes Sinhala and Tamil. Statistical approach is more suitable for structurally
dissimilar pairs of languages and efficient solution for large text translation. In Sri Lanka we have a rising need
for translation for Sinhala and Tamil and the statistical machine translation approach is more suitable for the
concerned languages. Sinhala and Tamil have a similarity in grammar and statistical approach will help to obtain
more accurate results. We have developed a bi-directional translation system for both Tamil to Sinhala and Sinhala
to Tamil for this research. We have used the Sri Lankan parliament corpus to train the language model. We have
critically evaluated the both systems with parameter optimizations and have obtained the most accurate and efficient
system. We have also utilized the scoring techniques like BLEU [2, 8] & NIST [2] for the system evaluation and
we have integrated the MERT technique to tune the decoder.
