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 communication, as the normal brain possesses the intelligence required for this task. This was clearly beyond the capability of computers, in the early days of Artificial Intelligence. Hence, most computer languages traditionally had (and still have) unnaturally rigid syntax for the benefit of interpretation by (not so intelligent) machines.
However, the trend has been for computers to get more intelligent with passing years -- and thus to better understand natural languages with all the nuances. Alexa and Siri are examples of programs that can comprehend loosely structured short commands in English and some other languages. In other words, NLP is all about computer languages becoming less structured and less rigid!
It may be the cultural baggage of elitism that thwarted the evolution of Sanskrit into a "natural language" -- one that is vibrant and inclusive, better suited for the needs of intelligent human communication. And also for emerging machine intelligence!
Humans do not need to dumb down to interact with machines. At the same time, machines are getting smarter with each passing day, and thus catching up with humans!
Ref: IIT Kharagpur to set stage for Centre for Indian Knowledge System – The KGP Chronicle (iitkgp.ac.in)

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