Education
2023 - Now:
PhD in Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany. Dissertation: Adapting Text Generation to Individual Users.
2020 - 2022:
MSc by Research in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Katubedda, Sri Lanka. Thesis: Pre-training and fine-tuning multilingual seq-to-seq models for domain-specific low-resource NMT.
2014 - 2018:
Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons), University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka. Thesis: Text Editing with Dynamic Prediction and Spell Checking Using Machine Learning for Sri Lankan Languages.
Employment
2023 - Now:
Doctoral Researcher, Language Science & Technology, Saarland University, Germany.
2020 - 2022:
Research Assistant at National Languages Processing Centre (NLPC), University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
2018 - 2020:
Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer, WSO2, Sri Lanka.
2016 - 2017:
Research Intern, WSO2, Sri Lanka.
Awards & Honors
2021:
Best Paper Award, MERCon 2021 (Big Data / ML / Cloud Computing track).
2019:
Outstanding Excellence Award, WSO2 (2019 performance).
2018:
2nd Place, Undergraduate Research Symposium, University of Ruhuna.
2017:
Merit Award, University of Ruhuna Invention & Innovation Exhibition.
Talks & Tutorials
2022:
Tutorial & Workshop: Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models for NMT: Tips, Tricks and Challenges and Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: Fine-tuning Using Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-trained Models. Toronto Machine Learning Micro-Summit on NLP (TMLS).
2022:
Presentation: Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation? CoSubmitting Summer (CSS) Workshop at ICLR 2022.
2021:
Tutorial: Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages. ICON 2021: 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing.
2020:
Presentation: Multilingual Neural Machine Translation for Sinhala–Tamil–English. 6th Annual Symposium on Natural Language Processing, University of Moratuwa.
Service & Mentoring
Reviewing:
Information Processing & Management (journal); ACL Rolling Review (ARR); WMT 2026; LREC.
Teaching:
Instructor / TA, University of Moratuwa (2020–2022): Object-Oriented Programming & Software Development, Graph Theory for Computing, Research & Report Writing, Bioinformatics. Visiting Evaluator, BIT final-year projects (2020–2021).
Supervision:
- William LaCroix (Master's thesis, 2026: Precise, Grade-Specific Text Simplification via Weighted Adapter Merging for Second Language Acquisition; co-supervised with Prof. Alexander Koller and Dr. Ji-Ung Lee).
- Nuwanga Herath and Thisal Tennakoon (Bachelor's thesis, 2022: Pivot-based Transfer Learning on Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation; co-supervised with Dr. Surangika Ranathunga).