The University of Hyderabad has launched an online interdisciplinary Sanskrit programme with the help of a computer software dubbed Saṃsādhanī that was built using 15 years of research. The platform will host various computer tools that will facilitate access to ancient Sanskrit texts and help students analyse any text in the language.
The software platform and the programme are a result of a collaboration between the university’s Department of Sanskrit and Gérard Huet, a professor and computer linguist from the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, France. During the designing process of the software, the computational rigour in the sūtras of Panini’s grammar helped Huet design his segmenter efficiently, said Huet in a statement.
The course has already received 250 registrations from candidates belonging to all over the world “from Fiji to California,” who are from diverse backgrounds such as Arts, Humanities, Engineering and Medicine. The candidates also belong to a diverse age group — ranging from 20 to 80 years.
The four instructors who will teach the course include Amba Kulkarni, professor at UoH’s Department of Sanskrit, Huet, Arjuna SR from Manipal University, and Pavankumar Satuluri from Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth, Kochi. Arjuna is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, Manipal University, while Satuluri is an assistant professor at the School of Linguistics & Literary Studies, Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth.
“On the one hand we are looking at how to leverage computer technology to overcome the language barrier, how to reduce the time to learn a new language, and on the other hand we are also exploring the IGT for building these computational tools,” says Kulkarni, who is also the coordinator of the new course, in a statement. Kulkarni has worked on Panini’s grammar from computational and Natural Language Processing perspectives.
According to Basuthkar Jagadeeshwar Rao, the vice-chancellor of the university, this course would be a trendsetter in understanding the construction of ideas using languages with the help of language analysis, the rigour of computation and scientific methods. The launch of the course was the rediscovery of Panini through modern computational tools, added Rao.
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