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Sanskrit Project Abstract

Sanskrit has an unambiguous grammar developed in the 6th century BC by Panini which could make it suitable for natural language processing. Panini established 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics. A key aspect of Sanskrit is that words represent properties rather than objects, but vibhaktis allow words to represent objects by adding suffixes. This is analogous to classes and pointers in object-oriented programming languages. The project aims to analyze Sanskrit's potential for NLP and consider developing object-oriented programming based on Sanskrit semantics.

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Swarnava Maitra
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435 views3 pages

Sanskrit Project Abstract

Sanskrit has an unambiguous grammar developed in the 6th century BC by Panini which could make it suitable for natural language processing. Panini established 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics. A key aspect of Sanskrit is that words represent properties rather than objects, but vibhaktis allow words to represent objects by adding suffixes. This is analogous to classes and pointers in object-oriented programming languages. The project aims to analyze Sanskrit's potential for NLP and consider developing object-oriented programming based on Sanskrit semantics.

Uploaded by

Swarnava Maitra
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CaseStudyofSanskritasapotentialProgramming Language Abstract

Sanskrit essentially means a language developed to formal perfection, as opposed to Prakrit, which means Natural Language. This means that the grammar and semantic structure of Sanskrit is essentially unambiguous, which makes it a very suitablecandidateforthestudyofNaturalLanguageProcessing. The erstwhile Sanskrit grammar was developed in the 6th century B.C. Pini is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as Ashtadhyayi, the foundational text of the grammatical branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of Vedic religion. Pini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the controlofgrammaticalderivations.Thistechniquelaterbecamea standardmethodinthedesignofcomputerprogramminglanguages. The major property of Sanskrit grammar that comes into picturewhileconsideringitasalanguagefordigitalprocessing, istheprinciplethat: Words represent properties of objects/entities and not objects/entitiesthemselves. But,inspokenlanguage,wealwaysrefertoobjectsandnot properties. (The object being referred to need not exist in the real world. It is sufficient if it exists in the speakers imagination.) So we need a way to force the above words to represent objects rather than properties. That way of forcing a word(whichrepresentsaproperty)torepresentanobjectiscalled vibhakti.Thereareactually8kindsofvibhaktisinall.Here,we areconsideringonlythefirstvibhakti. Thewaytorepresentavibhaktiisbyaddingasuffixtoa word(:).Thisway,whiletheworditselfrepresentsaproperty, byaddingtothesuffixtotheworditnowrepresentsanobject that has the particular property. This is analogous to the followingpropositioninEnglishlanguage. If sun represents a property (eg. that of being hot and emittinglightandheat),then sun:representsanobjectthathas

thepreviouslymentionedproperty,thatisthesunitself. Therefore,inaveryabstractsense,thisislikesayingthat atypicalwordinSanskritislikeclassinJava(withoutmethods) and the vibhaktified form of that word is like a pointer to an objectofthatclass. Now a scenario can be considered where n different words representnobjectswithnproperties.Allofthesecanbeusedto formameaningfulsentence,byvirtueofthefollowingproperty. Wordshavingthesamevibhaktirepresentthesameobjectandnot different objects. So the 5 different words actually do not represent5differentobjects,rathertheyarelikepointersthat pointtothesameobject. Thismechanismisexplainedinthefollowingfigure.

Thus, the objective of the project is to perform an analyticalresearchofusingSanskritasacandidateforNLP.If this yields favourable results, then we shall also consider the mechanics of constituting object oriented programming procedures fromtheexistingsemanticsofSanskritlanguage.

ProjectGroupMembers: AmalaSaraf BhagyeshChaudhari SwarnavaMaitra TanikaShirwaiker

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