Samāsa-Kartā: An Online Tool for Producing Compound Words using IndoWordNet

Samāsa or compounds are a regular feature of Indian Languages. They are also found in other languages like German, Italian, French, Russian, Spanish, etc. Compound word is constructed from two or more words to form a single word. The meaning of this word is derived from each of the individual words of the compound. To develop a system to generate, identify and interpret compounds, is an important task in Natural Language Processing. This paper introduces a web based tool – Samāsa-Kartā for producing compound words. Here, the focus is on Sanskrit language due to its richness in usage of compounds; however, this approach can be applied to any Indian language as well as other languages. IndoWordNet is used as a resource for words to be compounded. The motivation behind creating compound words is to create, to improve the vocabulary, to reduce sense ambiguity, etc. in order to enrich the WordNet. The Samāsa-Kartā can be used for various applications viz., compound categorization, sandhi creation, morphological analysis, paraphrasing, synset creation, etc.