An Ontology for Comprehensive Tutoring of Euphonic Conjunctions of Sanskrit Grammar

Euphonic conjunctions (sandhis) form a very important aspect of Sanskrit morphology and phonology. The traditional and modern methods of studying about euphonic conjunctions in Sanskrit follow different methodologies. The former involves a rigorous study of the Paninian system embodied in Panini's Ashtadhyayi, while the latter usually involves the study of a few important sandhi rules with the use of examples. The former is not suitable for beginners, and the latter, not sufficient to gain a comprehensive understanding of the operation of sandhi rules. This is so since there are not only numerous sandhi rules and exceptions, but also complex precedence rules involved. The need for a new ontology for sandhi-tutoring was hence felt. This work presents a comprehensive ontology designed to enable a student-user to learn in stages all about euphonic conjunctions and the relevant aphorisms of Sanskrit grammar and to test and evaluate the progress of the student-user. The ontology forms the basis of a multimedia sandhi tutor that was given to different categories of users including Sanskrit scholars for extensive and rigorous testing.

Computational Algorithms Based on the Paninian System to Process Euphonic Conjunctions for Word Searches

Searching for words in Sanskrit E-text is a problem that is accompanied by complexities introduced by features of Sanskrit such as euphonic conjunctions or sandhis. A word could occur in an E-text in a transformed form owing to the operation of rules of sandhi. Simple word search would not yield these transformed forms of the word. Further, there is no search engine in the literature that can comprehensively search for words in Sanskrit E-texts taking euphonic conjunctions into account. This work presents an optimal binary representational schema for letters of the Sanskrit alphabet along with algorithms to efficiently process the sandhi rules of Sanskrit grammar. The work further presents an algorithm that uses the sandhi processing algorithm to perform a comprehensive word search on E-text.

A Binary Schema and Computational Algorithms to Process Vowel-based Euphonic Conjunctions for Word Searches

Comprehensively searching for words in Sanskrit E-text is a non-trivial problem because words could change their forms in different contexts. One such context is sandhi or euphonic conjunctions, which cause a word to change owing to the presence of adjacent letters or words. The change wrought by these possible conjunctions can be so significant in Sanskrit that a simple search for the word in its given form alone can significantly reduce the success level of the search. This work presents a representational schema that represents letters in a binary format and reduces Paninian rules of euphonic conjunctions to simple bit set-unset operations. The work presents an efficient algorithm to process vowel-based sandhis using this schema. It further presents another algorithm that uses the sandhi processor to generate the possible transformed word forms of a given word to use in a comprehensive word search.