Panini’s Kāraka System and Challenges for Computing

The Unit for Linguistic Data at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics / Data Science Institute, NThe Unit for Linguistic Data at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics / Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway is delighted to welcome Prof Girish Nath Jha of the Jawaharlal Nehru University to be the next speaker in our seminar series. Prof Jha will highlight some of the semantic aspects of Pāṇini’s kāraka system and highlight the challenges in implementing these rules. Register here.

Abstract:

Panini’s grammar is widely known for its formal treatment of the Sanskrit language and as a cross-linguistic model. However, on a closer look, several complications arise especially in Pāṇini’s recourse to semantics in many of the sūtras like those of the vidhi and the saṁjñā. This seems to happen more in the kāraka prakaraṇa than in other components of his grammar Aṣṭādhyāyī. The talk will focus on some of the semantic aspects of Pāṇini’s kāraka system and highlight the challenges in implementing these rules. It will also look at possible strategies to handle such situations and propose pseudocode renderings of those kāraka sūtras which are relatively easily mappable.

About the Speaker:

Prof. Girish Nath Jha is a Professor who teaches Computational Linguistics at the School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University(JNU). He is also a Concurrent Faculty at the School of Engineering, Center of Linguistics and the Special Center of e-learning in JNU. His research interests include Indian languages, corpora and standards, Sanskrit and Hindi linguistics, Science & Technology in Sanskrit, Lexicography, Machine Translation, e-learning, web-based technologies, RDBMS techniques, software design and localization. Prof Jha has completed several sponsored projects for Indian language technology development and led a consortium of 17 universities/institutes to develop corpora and standards for Indian languages. He has done collaborative research with the Center for Indic Studies University of Massachusetts Dartmouth as “Mukesh and Priti Chatter Distinguished Professor of History of Science” during 2009-12. He was awarded DAAD fellowship in 2014 and 2016 to teach Digital Humanities and Indology at the University of Würzburg, Germany and has been a visiting Professor at the University of Florence in the summer of 2016. He was also awarded the prestigious Datta Peetha Asthan Vidwan Award for Sanskrit. His work on the revival of the Sharada script earned him the KECSS felicitation award.

He also worked as a software engineer and software development specialist in the USA before joining JNU in 2002. He has had several consultancies, including Google, Nuance, Swiftkey, Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Linguistic Data Consortium (U. Penn), U.Mass Dartmouth and EZDI.

Host:

The seminar series is led by the Cardamom project team. The Cardamom project aims to close the resource gap for minority and under-resourced languages using deep-learning-based natural language processing (NLP) and exploiting similarities of closely related languages. The project further extends this idea to historical languages, which can be considered closely related to their modern form. It aims to provide NLP through both space and time for languages that current approaches have ignored.

Registration link: