Computer Processing of Sanskrit Nominal Inflections

Book excerpt: Computer Processing of Sanskrit Nominal Inflections: Methods and Implementation is the result of Research and Development (R&D) at the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) level at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. The title of the dissertation was “Machine Recognition and Morphological Analysis of Subanta-Padas.” The work, which is based on the reverse engineering implementation of Panini’s Sanskrit Grammar, brings together new and original studies in the area of computational linguistics, language technology and natural language processing with reference to parsing Sanskrit nominal inflections. On the surface level, Panini has defined rules in a forward looking generative fashion which makes reverse analysis necessary for parsing. Since parsing inflections is the first basic step towards complete analysis, the present work has relevance for any larger system that may evolve in future.