4. A Sanskrit Maxim

Sanskrit Segmentation

Maxim Likhachev

My long-term research goal is to develop a methodology for robust real-time decision-making in autonomous systems. To achieve this goal, my students and I research novel decision-making algorithms and use these algorithms to build planning modules that enable complex robotic systems to operate autonomously. Our approach is currently based on pushing the limits of graph searchbased planning. Con...

Formal Structure of Sanskrit Text: Requirements Analysis for a Mechanical Sanskrit Processor

We discuss the mathematical structure of various levels of representation of Sanskrit text in order to guide the design of computer aids aiming at useful processing of the digitalised Sanskrit corpus. Two main levels are identified, respectively called the linear and functional level. The design space of these two levels is sketched, and the computational implications of the main design choices...

The Death of Sanskrit*

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India’s past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the ...

Universal Dependencies for Sanskrit

We present the first steps towards a treebank of Sanskrit within the Universal Dependencies framework. Our dataset is tiny at the moment, consisting of less than 200 sentences—a result of a summer internship project. Nevertheless, this seems to be, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available piece of syntactically annotated Sanskrit text. We also present a parsing experiment, wit...