I am a Computational Linguist focusing on understanding and modeling natural languages, with a special focus on Tamil and other low-resource languages, using computational methods.
I am a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Additionally, I am a visiting researcher and a member of the Computational Linguistics Group in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany.
Herz Fellow (2023-2024), University of Konstanz, Germany
Founding Member of Yarl IT Hub
IVLP Participant, U.S. Department of State
Ongoing Projects (Open for Collaboration)
Building a Sri Lankan Tamil corpus
OCR/TTS for Tamil
Thirukkural Treebank
Building a Linguistically-Aware Tamil LLM
Recent news
Published a paper on pre-tokenization/tokenization at COLING 2025 - Find it here
Successfully organised a workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL-2025) on Jan 19, 2025 at COLING 2025 - Proceedings is here
( Some news from 2024) )
Led an exchange visit to the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, from December 5 to 12, 2024.
Recruting Research assistants - apply here: https://www.csc.jfn.ac.lk/vacancies/
Assumed the position of President of the Jaffna Science Association from June 2024. I look forward to supporting the development of the region.
Delivered a keynote address at the International Conference on Tamil Computing and Information Technology to be held at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA, on June 14-16, 2024.
Secured a Google grant to develop a Sri Lankan Tamil Corpus (Speech and Text).
Visited as researcher the Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Germany, from April to the 14 of June 2024.
Secured a DAAD-SDG grant to develop resources for South Asian languages together with my PhD supervisors, evaluators, and their team from the University of Konstanz, the University of Moratuwa, and the University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. I will lead the development of resources for the Tamil language.
Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran
sarves at univ.jfn.ac.lk
Department of Computer Science
University of Jaffna
Sri Lanka