Speaking to Education Times, Amba Kulkarni, Professor, Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad, says, “To read any Sanskrit text it is necessary to know the suffix attached to a Sanskrit word which is not seen separately. This suffix is integrated with the Sanskrit word. Learning Sanskrit is a difficult task as the learners have to memorize all the forms of the verb. In Sanskrit language, apart from singular and plural, words have dual forms. To help the users, we have designed a computational tool where we just enter a word and the machine shows all the forms of that Sanskrit word. For example, if we enter the word Ram, the computer will provide us with all its forms in the Sanskrit language.”
The computational tool is there to recognize the word. But, Sanskrit language requires a learner to identify word and sentence boundaries which is a challenge.
“Computational tools help to solve all these difficulties. These computational tools are used as an aid for the learners to understand the grammar lessons and rules. Another aspect that needs attention That is, Sanskrit is rich in poetry. Almost all the literature in Sanskrit is in the form of verse or poetry and it is difficult to understand. Now we have computational tools that can convert these poetic forms into prose form which is easy to understand Huh. ”
Kulkarni further adds that through this computational tool there is also an option to give meaning of sentences in Sanskrit with the help of visual graphics, which makes learning Sanskrit an easy and interesting task.
For each Sanskrit word, a link is also provided to dictionaries such as Sanskrit-Hindi dictionary, Sanskrit-English dictionary and Sanskrit-French dictionary, further adds Kulkarni.
Girish Nath Jha, Professor of Computational Linguistics, School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies, JNU says, “One needs tools to teach Sanskrit in online mode. Tools such as sandhi instruments that teach how sounds are made, morphological tools that will teach word formation and phonetic instruments can also be used to teach Sanskrit. Moral values can be taught to young children through animated Panchatantra stories. Where there is no human teacher role, e-learning is the dominant method for teaching, but software assumes the role of the teacher. It comes under AI Intelligent Tutoring System. We have started MA program in Sanskrit in online mode which will be launched next year. Sanskrit is taught in ashrams where the learner is immersed in Sanskrit culture. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) centric approach will not be so widespread, but a large number of students will be able to learn that language. JNU has many multimedia e-learning tools. We also have a certificate course in Computational Linguistics for Sanskrit.”
Subhash Chandra, Assistant Professor, Department of Sanskrit, University of Delhi (DU), says, “In the past many computer scientists did a lot of research in Sanskrit language. In the Department of Computer Science, a branch of Natural Language Processing was introduced. It is also called computational linguistics which is a combination of computer science and any language. We make computer applications for the language. In 1991, the Ministry of Electronics and IT set up a department called Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL). We use audio-visual presentations like PPTs and also use some linguistic tools to teach Sanskrit grammar.”
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