Sanskrit Linguistics Web Services

We propose to demonstrate a collection of tools for Sanskrit Computational Linguistics developed by cooperating teams in the general setting of Web services. These services offer a systematic architecture integrating multilingual lexicons, morphological generation and analysis, segmentation and parsing, and interlink with the Sanskrit Library digital repository. They may be used as distributed Internet services, or installed as local tools on individual users workstations. 1 Community building Sanskrit is the primary culture-bearing language of India, with a continuous production of literature in all fields of human endeavour over the course of four millennia. It benefited from a strong linguistics tradition, established from early times, and notably from the grammar composed by Pān. ini around the fourth century B.C.E., and commented since by innumerable grammatical treatises. This fairly complete descriptive apparatus took a prescriptive character, resulting in a constrained evolution of the language within its official grammar, leading to its stability as a semi-formal language. On the other hand, multiple styles of writing treatises, commentaries, and even poetry, led to a variety of specific dialects, both in prose and in versified form. The efforts towards developing tools for the computational treatment of Sanskrit have been steadily progressing both at national as well as international level. A Sanskrit Computational Linguistics consortium funded by the Indian Government coordinates the development of consistent tools within 7 research institutes. In 2007, the first of a series of International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposia was organized in Paris with the aim of gathering a community of teams sharing ideas as well as linguistic resources, and developing inter-operable software. These symposia have benefited the computer scientists from the grammatical expertise of the traditional scholars, while the traditional scholars could see the practical applications of the thousand of years old theories. Within this general effort, specific tools were developed at Inria in Paris and University of Hyderabad for the analysis of Sanskrit texts, designed as inter-communicating Web services. A specific human-machine interface was developed, allowing annotation experts to produce tagged tree banks for the Sanskrit Library, a digital TEI-conformant repository of Sanskrit corpus. This joint work was presented at COLING-2012 (Goyal et al., 2012). We herein propose to demonstrate the current functionalities of this software platform. 2 Architecture of components It was deemed counter-productive to attempt to build a monolithical rigid system, and we turned rather to developing on various sites independent components, communicating with each This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Page numbers and proceedings footer are added by the organizers. License details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/