Building a WordNet for Sinhala

Sinhala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and is used by over 19 million people. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages and its origins date back to at least 2000 years. It has developed into its current form over a long period of time with influences from a wide variety of languages including Tamil, Portuguese and English. As for any other language, a WordNet is extremely important for Sinhala to take it into the digital era. This paper is based on the project to develop a WordNet for Sinhala based on the English (Princeton) WordNet. It describes how we overcame the challenges in adding Sinhala specific characteristics which were deemed important by Sinhala language experts to the WordNet while keeping the structure of the original English WordNet. It also presents the details of the crowdsourcing system we developed as a part of the project consisting of a NoSQL database in the backend and a web-based frontend. We conclude by discussing the possibility of adapting this architecture for other languages and the road ahead for the Sinhala WordNet and Sinhala NLP.