A Binary Schema and Computational Algorithms to Process Vowel-based Euphonic Conjunctions for Word Searches

Comprehensively searching for words in Sanskrit E-text is a non-trivial problem because words could change their forms in different contexts. One such context is sandhi or euphonic conjunctions, which cause a word to change owing to the presence of adjacent letters or words. The change wrought by these possible conjunctions can be so significant in Sanskrit that a simple search for the word in its given form alone can significantly reduce the success level of the search. This work presents a representational schema that represents letters in a binary format and reduces Pāṇinian rules of euphonic conjunctions to simple bit set-unset operations. The work presents an efficient algorithm to process vowelbased sandhis using this schema. It further presents another algorithm that uses the sandhi processor to generate the possible transformed word forms of a given word to use in a comprehensive word search.