Sanskrit, Machine Language of The Gods

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http://www.amritapuri.org/education/aict/hq/artintell.htm

 

It's indeed fitting that the Amrita Institute of

Technology at Amritapuri is probing the potential

technological uses for the ancient Sanskrit language.

Since the college was founded and is literally

overlooked by Satguru Mata Amritanandamayi, where else

should such research take place if not here.

 

Amrita Innovative Technology Foundation Labs - the

research-and-development arm of AICT - has started

conducting research on using Sanskrit for Artificial

Intelligence and Natural Language Processing.

 

AICT's aim is to graduate students with the highest

standard in modern education, but at the same time to

foster in them India's spiritual values and culture.

Thus, studies such as Sanskrit's potential as an

artificial language are the perfect medium for the

school to accomplish its mission.

 

Researchers believe Sanskrit and computers are a

perfect fit. In 1985, Rick Briggs, a researcher for

NASA, published a paper on the potential uses of

Sanskrit as a machine language. Natural languages are

basically too imprecise for use as machine languages.

Thus programmers have been forced to create artificial

languages.

 

However, in Briggs' paper, he hailed Sanskrit as an

exception. "Among the accomplishments of the

[sanskrit] grammarians can be reckoned a method for

paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical

not only in essence but in form with current work in

Artificial Intelligence. A natural language can serve

as an artificial language also, and that much work in

AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old."

 

According to Briggs, some of the factors that make

Sanskrit such a perfect machine language are that the

word order of its sentences is not strict. For

example, consider the sentence "Raamah Phalam

Kaadhathi." All the six sentences formed from the

various combinations of these three words carry the

same meaning. For instance, "Phalam Raamah Kaadhathi"

also means "Raama eats fruit," where as in English,

obviously, "Fruit eats Raama" will give a very wrong

meaning to the sentence.

 

Sanskrit's rich case structure enables one to get a

lot of information from a verb. For example,

"patithavan" indicates that it is a verb in past

tense, third person, male, and singular number, in

addition to indicating the root "pat" that means

"reading." In other words, the full meaning of

"patithavaan" will be: An action "reading" is taking

place in the past by a single male third person.

 

Being a language used for human interaction, Sanskrit

is not absolutely free from ambiguity. But the extent

to which its ambiguity obstructs the analysis is

significantly less.

 

And finally, the technique used to analyze Sanskrit is

the same for both active-voiced and passive-voiced

sentences. But in English, it is known that for a

sentence in passive voice, the parser retraces its

entire pass abandoning the current analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

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