Verbal Roots in the Sanskrit Wordnet

Wordnets (WN) are accepted worldwide as useful lexical tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP) . Projects for building WNs of different languages of the world are going for quite some time. The scenario for Indian Languages is also encouraging. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) has successfully created WNs for Hindi and Marathi.There have been more than 100,000 hits of the sites for these resources. The importance of developing a Sanskrit WN (SWN), in the context of Indian Languages (ILs) cannot be over-emphasised. Languages in India are broadly categorized into three families, one of which namely, Indo-European, has Sanskrit as a major language historically. Many modern Indian Languages like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujrathi, Panjabi, Oriya etc. have substantial number of borrowed Sanskrit words. Even the grammars of these languages have categories of words called tadbhava (generated from Sanskrit) and tatsama(similar to Sanskrit). SWN, it follows, can logically provide a natural platform for integrating IL WNs. Several institutes and scholars have been trying to undertake the task of building SWN with various strategies. Not much of substance, however, is visible on this front. The main issue regarding the structure of SWN that comes up at the time of discussion is that while building the SWN, traditional knowledge bases (śastric knowledge) should be used, and one should not blindly follow structures of existing WNs which are based on western concepts. It is this particular aspect that is aimed at studying in the present paper.