A Singlish Supported Post Recommendation Approach for Social Media

Abstract

Social media is an attractive means of communication which people used to exchange information. Post recommendation eliminates the overflooding of information in social media to the users’ news feed by suggesting the best matching information based on users’ preference that in return increase the usability. Social media users use different languages and their variations where most of the Sri Lankan users are accustomed to use Sinhala and Romanized Sinhala. However, post recommendation approaches used in current social media applications do not cater to code-mixed text. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel post recommendation approach that supports Singlish. The study is separated into two major components as language identification and transliteration, and post recommendation. In this study, script identification was performed using regular expressions while a Naïve Bayes classification model that accomplished 97% of accuracy was employed for language identification of Romanized text. Transliteration of Singlish to Sinhala was conducted using a character level seq2seq BLSTM model with a BLEU score of 0.94. Furthermore, Google translation API and YAKE were used for Sinhala-English translation and keyword extraction respectively. Post recommendation model utilized a combination of rule-based and CF techniques that accomplished the RMSE of 0.2971 and MAE of 0.2304.