ARS - 2006
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/164
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Item Design and Implementation of a Web-Based Faculty Information System(University of Kelaniya, 2006) Kumara, K.H.; Munasinghe, L.; Jayasuriya, K.D.; Dias, N.G.J.; de Silva, C.H.; Kalingamudali, S.R.D.Although Information Systems (IS) are valuable elements for organizations, the private and public sectors in Sri Lanka are reluctant to use IS for decision making, organizing and classifying data, processing transactions, and for many other activities. This is caused by the lack of computer literacy and conventional attitudes of the majority of the Sri Lankan community. Even in the higher education institutions in Sri Lanka, majority of both staff and students who are well aware of information technology, rely on conventional ways of handling information. One major reason for the above issue is lack of availability of application software well suited for their needs. On one hand, such types of software are rarely used by institutes because of their high cost; on the other hand, they are highly organization dependent. Hence steps have been taken to build a Faculty Information System (FIS) for the Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya. The FIS was developed in a network environment, with the active participation of all those involved by means of continuous dialogues with the aim of both promoting and demonstrating its benefits and by catering to the different needs arising from the faculty community. The FIS consists of three major subsystems, namely FIS Web Based Subsystem (FISW), FIS Intranet Sub System (FISI) and FIS Examination Sub System (FISE). FISW provides www access to FIS users at any time from anywhere. FISI enables the capability of access to FIS via the Faculty office local area network with security restrictions. FISE processes the examination data in a highly secured environment which is separated from both FISW and FISI. FISI and FISW eventually connect with FISE under security restrictions as required. It is clear that development of this type of tool has social, cultural and technological dimensions. What we planned is one thing, what happened in reality and how the stake holders respond to the tool is another. An evidence of the neediness of this type of tool to the faculty is the number of accesses, 41784, in two years. The above figure is not a complete measure of acceptance of FIS. To detect its defects and limitations, in addition it is necessary to take into account the number of pages requested by each registered user in the FIS. These statistics can be used to enhance the features of FIS.Item A tool for automatic segmentation of a given Sinhala text into Syllables for Speech synthesis and Speech recognition(University of Kelaniya, 2006) Kumara, K.H.; Dias, N.G.J.; Sirisena, H.In the present era of human computer interaction, the educationally under privileged and the rural communities of Sri Lanka are being deprived of technologies that pervade the growing interconnected web of computers and communications. One good solution for this problem would be computers talking to the common man in the language he is comfortable to communicate in. Sri Lankan population has a significant percentage of people who are educationally under-privileged. On one hand we claim that to build an EGovernment or an E-Society in Sri Lanka on the other hand, the advances we make are totally inaccessible by a large number of people in Sri Lanka. Under such circumstances, we cannot expect rural/educationally under-privileged people to use computers and IT products unless we remove the need of being literate, which exists as a barrier between them and computers. However, the interaction between the computer and the user is largely through keyboard and screen-oriented systems. In the current Sri Lankan context, this restricts the usage of computers to a miniscule fraction of the population, who are both computer-literate and conversant with written English. In order to enable a wider proportion of population to benefit from Information technology, there is a dire need for an interface other than keyboard and screen-interface that is widely in use at present. Speech technologies promise to be the next generation user interface. Software applications having speech and voice recognition abilities have a better chance to communicate with a large percentage of population which include educationally underprivileged, visually challenged and computer illiterates, if these applications can speak and understand the native language. It is well known that the transcription of orthographic words into syllables is one of the principal steps of a syllable based Speech synthesis and Speech recognition. Hence we put forward a dictionary based automatic syllabification tool for Speech Synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition in Sinhala language. Also it is capable to provide the frequency distributions of Vowels, Consonants and Syllables of given Sinhala text. Although there is no universal agreement for syllable definition, in this research our syllable definition can be considered as Cn 0 V n 1 Cn 0 where Cn 0 signifies 0 to n consonants and V n 1 signifies 1 to n vowels. In this tool, detection of Syllable boundaries for a given Sinhala sentence is achieved by four main phases: (1) Reformat everything encountered (e.g. digits, abbreviations) into words and punctuation.(2) Derive a phonemic representation for each word. (3) Determine the C n 0 V n 1 units for a given word. (4) Reformat above Cn 0 V n 1 units according to the Cn 0 V n 1 Cn 0 definition in order to obtain the syllable boundaries. Following example will give a better explanation of the algorithm.