Volume 04 No.1

Preliminaries

2023-08-17T05:00:24Z

Preliminaries

rbcL nucleotide sequence-based phylogenetic analysis of Nepenthes distillatoria L.

2023-08-16T12:56:21Z

rbcL nucleotide sequence-based phylogenetic analysis of Nepenthes distillatoria L. Jayathilake, H. P. K. U.; Yamada, Kana; Jayasinghe, J. M. C. B.; Rajapakse, Sanath Among carnivorous plant families, Nepenthaceae is a very peculiar family which has only one genus, Nepenthes. In Sri Lanka, this genus is represented by a single endemic species; Nepenthes distillatoria L. (1753). In that aspect, this plant has a key taxonomic value in Sri Lankan flora. This study was intended to identify the phylogenetic position and to establish a relationship between N. distillatoria and other selected carnivorous plant species of Nepenthaceae using rbcL sequences. DNA was extracted from leaves of N. distillatoria and subsequent PCR amplification of the rbcL region was performed. The amplified PCR products were subjected to DNA sequencing. The rbcL sequence alignments were constructed using MEGA v.7.0 and phylogenetic analyses were carried out under the Maximum Likelihood method. This study mainly introduces the partial coding sequence of the rbcL gene of N. distillatoria. The reconstructed phylogenetic tree based on the sequence results revealed that N. ventricosa, N. merrilliana, N. khasiana, N. bellii, and N. fusca are closely related species to N. distillatoria.

Comparative evaluation of performance of calves born through sex-sorted semen and conventional semen in Sri Lanka

2023-08-16T12:52:06Z

Comparative evaluation of performance of calves born through sex-sorted semen and conventional semen in Sri Lanka Amarasiria, P. G. I. D.; Alexander, P. A. B. D. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of sex sorted semen born calves with that of the conventional semen born calves in four veterinary ranges in Sri Lanka. A total of ten Jersey female calves born through sex sorted semen and ten Jersey female calves born through conventional semen were selected. The mean birth weight of calves born through sex sorted semen technology was 35.3 ± 3.6 kg and the conventional calves born was 31.6 ± 2.4 kg respectively. The mean weight gain per day of a sex semen born calf and a conventional semen born calf were 0.47 ± 0.1 kg/day and 0.45 ± 0.08 kg/day respectively. The mean birth weight of sex semen born calves was significantly higher (p < 0.05) compared to the mean birth weight of conventional semen born claves. No significant difference (p > 0.05) observed between mean weight gain per day of two groups of calves. Comparatively high mean birth weight of sex semen born claves may be due to high genetic merit of proven bull used in sex semen processing. Exposing to same management practices may be the cause of same weight gain per day in two groups of calves.

Automated text summarization of Sinhala online articles

2023-08-16T12:38:02Z

Automated text summarization of Sinhala online articles Akmal Jahan, M. A. C.; Wijesekara, K. K. C. Information retrieval is one of the major tasks in natural language processing applications. In digitalized world, there is a development of retrieval information from online platforms and there are abundant of information for a specific subject available in online. With the hustle and bustle, readers need to know whether the information is important according to their need within a very short time. Automated text summarization plays a key role in natural language processing applications. Many studies have been explored for summarizing different languages like English, Bengali, Hausa, Chinese, Hindi, etc. However, the local language like Sinhala is still in beginning stage. On the other hand, as a diverse country, there is a community and language diversity in Sri Lanka. Therefore, there are people who have less fluency in Sinhala as their mother-tongue is another local language like Tamil. Social media like Facebook provides platform for translation of content in a different language. However, other online platforms do not provide such translation process of the content. In such scenario, having a short summary of those articles would be an advantageous step for the readers who can easily understand the main idea of the content. Therefore, this work aims to generate an online platform that can provide a good summary for Sinhala language online articles. This research investigates extractive text summarization for Sinhala online articles using some state-of-the art algorithms in NLP applications to select a best suitable method. This work comparatively analyses the performance of TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and Text-Rank algorithms for Sinhala language. Performance of the algorithms is evaluated with human generated summary from online sources using ROUGE (Recall Oriented Understudy of Gisting Evaluation) where high ROUGE score (Measure the rate of n-gram overlapping of original text and automated summary) values represent the more accurate automated summary of the article. From the results, the TF-IDF algorithm comparatively performs better for Sinhala online article summarization with medium content size.