Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba (right) attends a joint news conference with Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake at the Prime Minister's Office on Monday. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake met in Tokyo on Monday and agreed that Japan will provide about 10 surveillance drones, worth about ¥500 million ($3.36 million), to the South Asian nation's navy. This will be Japan's first provision of defense equipment to Sri Lanka under its official security assistance program. The stability and development of Sri Lanka, which is located at a strategic point in the Indian Ocean, is extremely important, Ishiba said at a joint news conference after the meeting. In response, the president voiced his commitment to creating a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific region.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive general knowledge and reasoning abilities, yet their evaluation has predominantly focused on global or anglocentric subjects, often neglecting low-resource languages and culturally specific content. While recent multilingual benchmarks attempt to bridge this gap, many rely on automatic translation, which can introduce errors and misrepresent the original cultural context. To address this, we introduce SinhalaMMLU, the first multiple-choice question answering benchmark designed specifically for Sinhala, a low-resource language. The dataset includes over 7,000 questions spanning secondary to collegiate education levels, aligned with the Sri Lankan national curriculum, and covers six domains and 30 subjects, encompassing both general academic topics and culturally grounded knowledge. We evaluate 26 LLMs on SinhalaMMLU and observe that, while Claude 3.5 sonnet and GPT-4o achieve the highest average accuracies at 67% and 62% respectively, overall model performance remains limited. In particular, models struggle in culturally rich domains such as the Humanities, revealing substantial room for improvement in adapting LLMs to low-resource and culturally specific contexts.

To a ddress these gaps, prior work has sought to evaluate the cultural representations within AI generated output, b ut with few exceptions [30, 67], mostly through quantified, metricized approaches to representation such as statistical similarities and benchmark-style scoring [49, 84]. However, the use of these methods presumes that representation is an o bjective construct with an empirical, definitive ground truth that outputs can be compared against [e.g., 42, 84] [fo r a critique of ground truth, see 59]. Given limitations of these computational methods, evaluation of representation is reduced to basic recognition or factual generation of artifacts. Even when human feedback on representation is sought, it is solicited through narrow, constrained, quantitative scales from anonymized crowdworkers who often do not have th e lived experiences to evaluate nuances of cultural representation of other cultures. However, this approach to measuring representation is in contravention to decades of scholarship in the social sciences that emphasizes the subjective nature of representation, where judgments about representation in visual media are constructed in conversation with the viewer's lived experiences and the broader context within which an image is Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of thi s work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee pr ovided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

The paper overviews the shared task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages. It focuses on the reverse transliteration of low-resourced languages in the Indo-Aryan family to their native scripts. Typing Romanized Indo-Aryan languages using ad-hoc transliterals and achieving accurate native scripts are complex and often inaccurate processes with the current keyboard systems. This task aims to introduce and evaluate a real-time reverse transliterator that converts Romanized Indo-Aryan languages to their native scripts, improving the typing experience for users. Out of 11 registered teams, four teams participated in the final evaluation phase with transliteration models for Sinhala, Hindi and Malayalam. These proposed solutions not only solve the issue of ad-hoc transliteration but also empower low-resource language usability in the digital arena.

The need for and challenges of teaching artificial intelligence (AI) at primary, secondary, and upper-secondary levels have been a major focus of recent academic discussions [1],[2],[3]. Often referred to as AI4K12 [4], this area explores global initiatives that introduce AI to students from kindergarten through high school. The rapid advancements in deep learning and generative AI technologies suggest AI will become a transformative force. This realisation has prompted governments and policymakers to recognise the need to prepare future citizens for a world heavily influenced by AI. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into information systems, concerns are mounting about citizens' ability to use these systems responsibly and understand the consequences of not doing so [5]. Furthermore, anxieties regarding AI's potential impact on societal sustainability highlight the need to equip future workforces with the skills to combine human creativity with AI's potential to create sustainable systems.

Machine Transliteration provides the ability to transliterate a basic language into different languages in a computational way. Transliteration is an important technical process that has caught the attention most recently. The Sinhala transliteration has many constraints because of the insufficiency of resources in the Sinhala language. Due to these limitations, Sinhala Transliteration is highly complex and time-consuming. Therefore, the majority of the Sri Lankans uses non-formal texting language named 'Singlish' to make that process simple. This study has focused on the transliteration of the Singlish language at the word level by reducing the complication in the transliteration. A new approach of coding system has invented with the rule-based approach that can map the matching Sinhala words even without the vowels. Various typing patterns were collected by different communities for this. The collected data have analyzed with every Sinhala character and unique Singlish patterns related to them were generated. The system has introduced a newly initiated numeric coding system to use with the Singlish letters by matching with the recognized typing patterns. For the mapping process, fuzzy logic-based implementation has used. A codified dictionary has also implemented including unique numeric values. In this system, Each Romanized English letter was assigned with a unique numeric code that can construct a unique pattern for each word. The system can identify the most relevant Sinhala word that matches with the pattern of the Singlish word or it gives the most related word suggestions. For example, the word 'kiyanna,kianna, kynna, kynn, kiynna' have mapped with the accurate Sinhala word "kiyanna". These results revealed that the 'Swa Bhasha' transliteration system has the ability to enhance the Sinhala users' experience while conducting the texting in Singlish to Sinhala.

Colombo, Sri Lanka – Badly wounded from a Ukrainian attack on a Russian bunker in the Donetsk region, Sri Lankan fighter Senaka Bandara* tried to carry his fellow countryman, Nipuna Silva*, to safety. Senaka*, 36, was bleeding from his legs and hands. Nipuna's condition was worse – he had sustained injuries to his chest, hands and legs, according to Senaka. As the two Sri Lankans retreated under fire, another wave of Ukrainian drones struck their bunker in the occupied Donetsk region where the two served with the Russian military. "While I was carrying [Nipuna], there was another huge drone attack at the last bunker and Nipuna fell to the ground," Senaka said earlier this month while being treated for his injuries in a hospital in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

This paper provides an overview of the morphology and syntax of the Tamil language, focusing on its contemporary usage. The paper also highlights the complexity and richness of Tamil in terms of its morphological and syntactic features, which will be useful for linguists analysing the language and conducting comparative studies. In addition, the paper will be useful for those developing computational resources for the Tamil language. It is proven as a rule-based morphological analyser cum generator and a computational grammar for Tamil have already been developed based on this paper. To enhance accessibility for a broader audience, the analysis is conducted without relying on any specific grammatical formalism.

Assistive or enabling technologies aim to create more accessible and inclusive solutions for people living with disabilities. This is critical, since many such users rely on technology for daily activities such as mobility and communication. While the problems are global, there are unique challenges that exist in the Asia Pacific region when it comes to developing assistive technologies, particularly assistive devices. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) estimates that 650 million people in the Asia-Pacific region live with a disability.4 It is also well understood that disability statistics in the region could be significantly underreported.

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