SiPaKosa: A Comprehensive Corpus of Canonical and Classical Buddhist Texts in Sinhala and Pali

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Main Authors: Gurusinghe, Ranidu, Jayatilleke, Nevidu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Gurusinghe, Ranidu
Jayatilleke, Nevidu
author_facet Gurusinghe, Ranidu
Jayatilleke, Nevidu
contents SiPaKosa is a comprehensive corpus of Sinhala and Pali doctrinal texts comprising approximately 786K sentences and 9.25M words, incorporating 16 copyright-cleared historical Buddhist documents alongside the complete web-scraped Tripitaka canonical texts. The corpus was created through high-quality OCR using Google Document AI on historical manuscripts, combined with systematic web scraping of canonical repositories, followed by rigorous quality control and metadata annotation. The corpus is organised into language-specific subcorpora: Sinhala and Mixed Sinhala-Pali. We evaluate the performance of language models using ten pretrained models, with perplexity scores ranging from 1.09 to 189.67 on our corpus. This analysis shows that proprietary models significantly outperform open-source alternatives by factors of three to six times. This corpus supports the pretraining of domain-adapted language models, facilitates historical language analysis, and aids in the development of information retrieval systems for Buddhist scholarship while preserving Sinhala cultural heritage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29221
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SiPaKosa: A Comprehensive Corpus of Canonical and Classical Buddhist Texts in Sinhala and Pali
Gurusinghe, Ranidu
Jayatilleke, Nevidu
Computation and Language
SiPaKosa is a comprehensive corpus of Sinhala and Pali doctrinal texts comprising approximately 786K sentences and 9.25M words, incorporating 16 copyright-cleared historical Buddhist documents alongside the complete web-scraped Tripitaka canonical texts. The corpus was created through high-quality OCR using Google Document AI on historical manuscripts, combined with systematic web scraping of canonical repositories, followed by rigorous quality control and metadata annotation. The corpus is organised into language-specific subcorpora: Sinhala and Mixed Sinhala-Pali. We evaluate the performance of language models using ten pretrained models, with perplexity scores ranging from 1.09 to 189.67 on our corpus. This analysis shows that proprietary models significantly outperform open-source alternatives by factors of three to six times. This corpus supports the pretraining of domain-adapted language models, facilitates historical language analysis, and aids in the development of information retrieval systems for Buddhist scholarship while preserving Sinhala cultural heritage.
title SiPaKosa: A Comprehensive Corpus of Canonical and Classical Buddhist Texts in Sinhala and Pali
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29221