Sanskrit for Computers?
One of the speakers at the 3-day seminar held in Nov 2020 at IIT Kharagpur was Prof. Amba Kulkarni of the Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her topic was, "Sanskrit for Natural Language Processing". I have a feeling that her talk may have embarrassed many among the faculty at the IIT -- as Sanskrit is actually not suited for "Natural Language Processing"! Natural Language Processing (or NLP) is subset of computer programming -- which is about enabling computers to process and analyze natural language input. The goal is to make computers capable of "understanding" unstructured spoken commands and normal content of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language in these. A highly structured (and inflexible) language like Sanskrit is obviously unsuitable for human interaction. Which may explain why this language never gained acceptability among ordinary people. Even an illiterate person can understand nuance in human commun...