Browsing by Author "Ranathunga, 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.
Decomposition analysis of poverty in Sri Lanka: 1990-2010
(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Ranathunga, S.
Poverty has always occupied a prominent place in the economic development agenda of successive governments in Sri Lanka since independence. This is evidenced by the fact that Sri Lanka had achieved the 1st Millennium Development Goal by 2010 despite the difficulties caused by the long-lasting ethnic conflict. However, the economic benefits of development have not been evenly distributed over the whole island. Regional disparities are large and have been a key concern. Thus poverty decomposition into growth and redistribution provides a better picture for analysing poverty situation in Sri Lanka as it examine poverty reduction through increases in mean income/expenditure or changes in relative income distribution. Therefore the main objective of this paper is to examine the decomposition of change in poverty in Sri Lanka within last two decades into growth and distribution effects. Poverty decomposition has been calculated using the computational tool ‗POVCAL‘ developed and distributed by the World Bank. National poverty changes were decomposed into growth and redistribution components following the method of Datt and Ravallion (1992), using disaggregated household expenditure data from National Income and Expenditure Surveys 1990/91 and 2009/10 in Sri Lanka. The decomposition of the poverty change was done using the poverty headcount ratio, the poverty gap index and the severity of poverty in Sri Lanka based on HIES data in 1990 /91 and 2009/10 using national poverty lines for the respective years. The results show that mean consumption in Sri Lanka has increased; therefore the growth component has contributed to significant poverty reduction within the period 1990/91 to 2009/10. Further, the results confirm that the significant poverty reduction in Sri Lanka is fully accounted for by the increase in mean consumption. This effect carried through to the other poverty measures as well. Although usually the redistribution component is negative, here it has a positive value, indicating that the redistribution component has dominated the growth component of the change in poverty in Sri Lanka over the last two decades.
Determinants of the household poverty in the rural sector in Sri Lanka: 1990-2010
(2014) Ranathunga, S.; Gibson, J.
Do poverty determinants differ over expenditure deciles? A Sri Lankan case from 1990 to 2010
(2015) Ranathunga, S.
The Influence of Social Commerce on Consumer Decisions
(The International Technology Management Review, 2018) Hettiarachchi, H.A.H.; Wickramasinghe, C.N.; Ranathunga, S.
Today, comprehending consumer behavior is becoming dynamically challenging with the emergence of social commerce. Business organizations are now striving to convince consumers by exploiting the advantage of social support empowered by online social networks. Importantly, social ties in such online social networks facilitate trust as the most compelling benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which happened to be the major concerns with electronic commerce over the years. This research study is aimed at understanding the impact of social commerce on the consumer behavior, particularly consumer decision-making stages. Hence, this research was conducted as a quantitative study involving a cross-sectional survey and gathered valid responses from Facebook users. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze data and test hypotheses. The findings exhibited significant positive effects from social commerce on all the consumer decision-making stages namely; need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase decision. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of employing an appropriate social commerce strategy for business organizations.
Poverty impacts of agricultural trade liberalisation in Sri Lanka: A CGE analysis
(Reviewing International Encounters 2015, Research Center for Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2015) Ranathunga, S.; Strutt, A.
Opponents of free trade believe that more open trade exacerbates poverty in developing economies, particularly in agriculture. In contrast, advocates of trade liberalization often argue that economy-wide gains from trade liberalization make people better off. Although the links between trade and poverty are complex and much-debated many researchers, including trade and development economists, and policy makers believe that trade liberalization plays a vital role in poverty reduction in developing nations like Sri Lanka. This study examines potential poverty changes through various income strata of households under selected agricultural trade liberalisation scenarios in the Sri Lankan context. First, the poverty headcount in each population stratum was calculated, along with poverty elasticities using Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2006/7 data. Secondly, these data were calibrated with the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database (version 8.1). Finally, we used poverty measures and AIDADS calculations17 to build a GTAP-POV framework for Sri Lanka. Poverty changes for multilateral and unilateral liberalisation scenarios are analysed for seven household strata in Sri Lanka using the GTAP-POV framework. In addition, we model the impact of an Indo-Sri Lankan Free Trade Agreement (ISFTA), as an important example of a bilateral trade agreement. Although Sri Lanka has a very detailed and constantly updated poverty profile, very limited attempts have been made to study poverty within different income strata. Observing poverty changes using poverty elasticities over seven specific income strata is a new dimension for the Sri Lankan poverty profile, which can be used generate insights into the impacts of trade policy changes on poverty. Our GTAP-POV modelling and analysis suggests that multilateral trade liberalisation reduces poverty most effectively and that agricultural trade liberalisation is a very important component of this. However, even if multilateral liberalisation is not possible, unilateral reductions in tariffs by Sri Lanka may also lead to substantial levels of poverty reduction, again with agricultural liberalisation being a particularly important component. However, bilateral trade agreements such as ISFTA are likely to have much smaller impacts on poverty reduction for Sri Lanka
The Role of Social Commerce on Consumer Decisions: A Theoretical Foundation
(Department of Commerce and Financial Management, University of Kelaniya, 2017) Hettiarachchi, H.A.H.; Wickramasinghe, C.N.; Ranathunga, S.
The advent of social commerce phenomenon has largely started gaining attention in consumer behavior literature. Apparently, social commerce has shifted more power from the seller to the buyer and predominately fueled to strengthen e-commerce acceptance. Thus, understanding consumer behavior in the context of social commerce adoption has become inevitable for business organizations that aim at elevating their bottom-line, competitiveness and ensuring sustainability. Moreover, social ties facilitated in social commerce enable trust as the most promising benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which was the major striking concerns with online commerce over the years. Though examining the influence of social commerce on consumer behavior and decision making is started getting scholarly attention recently, adequate explanatory model laid on the relevant theoretical foundation in this regard is still fragmented. Consequently, researchers constructed this theoretical foundation with the intention of enriching extant literature and to lay a formal groundwork for investigating this phenomenon. Hence, this paper aimed to comprehend: the nature of online social networks, emerging social commerce phenomenon, the role of social support in social commerce and influence of social commerce on consumer decisions respectively.
Social Commerce and Consumer Decision Making: A Conceptual Model from Social Support Perspective.
(Sixth International Conference on Advances in Economics, Social Science and Human Behaviour Study (ESSHBS), 2017) Hettiarachchi, H.A.H.; Wickramasinghe, C. N.; Ranathunga, S.
The emergence of social commerce made a paradigm shift in the business-consumer relationship realm. In fact, more power has shifted from the seller to the buyer and predominately fueled to strengthen e-commerce acceptance. Thus, understanding consumer behavior in the context of social commerce adoption has become inevitable for organizations that aim to convince consumers by particularly exploiting the advantage of social relationships and support. Moreover, such social ties will be able to facilitate trust as the most promising benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which were the major concerns with online commerce over the years. This paper presents a framework to comprehend the impact of social commerce on the consumer decision making process stages; need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post purchase behavior with special reference to the social support perspective. In this context, pertaining literature in the field of social commerce; (1) lacks adequate explanatory model or (2) lacks substantial theoretical foundation or (3) consist practically complex models with inadequate empirical evidence. The research model employs the Social Commerce Constructs (SCC): recommendations and referrals, forums and communities, and ratings and reviews to examine the respective influence towards the consumer decision making process stages. Therefore, this paper intends to comprehend the impact of social commerce towards an integrative model incorporating all the consumer decision steps anticipating new knowledge. Further, this conceptual model is suggested to be empirically tested to validate the practical implications.