The Sanskrit (Pseudo)Periphrastic Future

The Death of Sanskrit*

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India’s past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the ...

Sanskrit Segmentation

Universal Dependencies for Sanskrit

We present the first steps towards a treebank of Sanskrit within the Universal Dependencies framework. Our dataset is tiny at the moment, consisting of less than 200 sentences—a result of a summer internship project. Nevertheless, this seems to be, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available piece of syntactically annotated Sanskrit text. We also present a parsing experiment, wit...

Anaphors in Sanskrit

Research in building robulst NLP systems with ambiguity resolution techniques has gained momentum in recent years. In particular, the anaphora resolution initiatives have reached unpreceented heights in last 10 years or so. Mitkov et. al (2001) have reported both rule based knowledge based approaches and machine learning based ‘knowledge poor’ approaches in an ACL issue devoted to this subject....

Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence — NASA

In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in...