Browsing by Author "Jayasena, S."

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A Comprehensive Part of Speech (POS) Tag Set for Sinhala Language.
(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dilshani, N.; Fernando, S.; Ranathunga, S.; Jayasena, S.; Dias, G.
Sinhala, which belongs to Indo-Aryan language family, is a morphologically complex language. Most of the features of the words are postpositionally affixed to the root word. Thus, well-developed Part of Speech (POS) tag sets for languages such as English cannot be easily adopted to create a POS tag set for Sinhala. Moreover, currently available Sinhala POS tag sets have many limitations such as the unavailability of tags for certain words. The objective of the research is to overcome and to identify ambiguities and limitations of the present POS tag sets for Sinhala language, and to develop a comprehensive multi-level tag set for Sinhala language. The new tag set was designed after a thorough evaluation of different types of corpora such as news articles and official government letters, and as well as an analysis of the existing POS tag set for Sinhala. This new tag set consists of 148 tags and is organized into 3 levels. Thus, it covers most of the word classes and inflection based grammatical variations of the Sinhala language. The ultimate purpose of developing this tag set is to implement an automatic POS tagger, which is an essential tool in implementing Natural Language Processing Applications. To train the automatic POS tagger, a corpus of 300000 words has been POS annotated manually using this tag set. This tag set produced an overall accuracy of 84.68% and it bypasses the other Sinhala POS taggers. However, this annotation is done only up to level 2 in the tag set. Annotating at level 3 has the potential to introduce many ambiguities to the manual annotation process, due to the large number of POS tags. Thus this opens up new research avenues to investigate on the use of inflectional morphological features of Sinhala language, in order to determine the POS tag of a word at the third level.
Influence of baseline inflammatory status on dietary effects of nutrition counseling in women with and without coronary artery disease
(Sri Lanka Medical Association, 2012) Thoradeniya, T.; Senenayake, C.; Wickremasinghe, R.; Mendis, S.; Jayasena, S.; Atukorala, S.
INTRODUCTION: Inflammatory status influences the biochemical response to diet, suggesting an additional mechanism increasing coronary artery disease (CAD) risk. Aims: To determine the effect of baseline inflammatory status on biochemical response to nutrition counseling to reduce CAD risk. METHODS: A 2x2 factorial experiment having an intervention was conducted among 40-60 year old women with (n=101) and without CAD (n=109). Intervention comprised nutrition counseling. Baseline and post-intervention data on diet, serum high sensitivity CRP (hsCRP), soluble ICAM-1 (sICAM-1), ferritin, folate, plasma total homocysteine (tHcy) concentrations and traditional CAD risk factors were assessed. RESULTS: At baseline tHcy, sICAM-1 and hsCRP concentrations were significantly higher (p<0.05) among women with CAD than in women without CAD. Baseline sICAM-1 [OR=3.19 (95"% CI, 1.65-6.17)] and tHcy concentrations [OR=1.33 (95% CI 1.1-1.61)] were independently associated with CAD after adjusting for other risk factors. Nutrition counseling significantly decreased serum total and LDL cholesterol and increased serum folate (p<0.05) in women without CAD, but not in women with CAD. Among women without CAD, nutrition counseling decreased serum total and LDL cholesterol, and increased serum folate (p<0.05) in the "low" hsCRP group (below median of controls) but not in the "high" hsCRP group (above median). CONCLUSIONS: Nutrition counseling was effective in reducing serum total and LDL cholesterol and increasing serum folate in women without CAD having a "low" baseline inflammatory status. The hindering effect of underlying inflammation, on the biochemical response to dietary modification should be considered in dietary interventions in CAD risk reduction.