Corpora and Technological Resources for Sanskrit

Introduction

Language resources are essential for effective language study and analysis. Developing high-quality data requires significant time and effort. Innovations like writing systems, the printing press, and computers have aided in storing language information. A comprehensive listing of authentic language data and tools will be beneficial for advancing language studies. These resources are crucial for understanding the evolution and growth of a particular language, especially in enhancing research and improving language technology. Various institutions, universities, and organisations throughout the world have been engaged to collect Sanskrit text and speech corpora. These corpora are useful for computational linguistics, language processing, machine translation, and preserving Sanskrit for NLP/AI applications.

Resource Development Challenges

Language technology presents a profitable and socially beneficial solution to overcome language barriers. However, the digitization of language data poses challenges, particularly in developing accurate language models for complex languages like Sanskrit. The first step in enabling computers to understand human language is encoding, achieved through the Unicode scheme, which assigns unique codes for Sanskrit characters.

Language Resources

Numerous materials exist to analyze Sanskrit data and develop technologies. These resources include text and speech corpora, dictionaries, ontologies, and multimedia databases, alongside software for collection, preparation, and analysis. A linguistic corpus, which represents real-time language usage, is vital for developing various language technologies.

The main application areas of language technology include spell and grammar checking, speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, and information retrieval. Language resources are foundational for these tools, enhancing communication and interaction between humans and computers.

Prominent Institutions and Initiatives

IIT Bombay

This corpus was created with the assistance and guidance of the Cell for Indian Science and Technology in Sanskrit (CISTS), Department of HSS, IIT Bombay. The 'Vāksañcayaḥ' Sanskrit voice corpus has about 78 hours of data and 45,953 sentences recorded at a 22 KHz sample rate. The content consists of readings from several Sanskrit Śāstras, as well as current stories, radio programs, and extempore talk.

AI4Bharat

AI4Bharat, a research lab at IIT Madras, is committed to enhancing AI technology for Indian languages through open-source initiatives. The lab has developed and released an extensive set of datasets, tools, and cutting-edge models. Its focus areas are transliteration, natural language understanding and generation, translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Sanskrit ASR datasets comprising natural conversations were collected in low-quality environments to produce high-quality TTS training data. In this regard, ai4bharat has 4.82 hours of Read and 30.93 hours of extempore speech data.

The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS)

The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) is a Sandhi-split corpus of Sanskrit texts that has been fully morphological and lexically analysed. The DCS is intended for text-historical analysis in Sanskrit linguistics and philology. Users can search for lexical units (words) and collocations in a corpus of around 4,800,000 manually tagged words from 650,000 text lines.

Sanskrit Activities at IIT Kanpur

IIT Kanpur has a prominent Sanskrit community. IITK collaborates with Central Sanskrit University (previously Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan) to offer Non-Formal Sanskrit Education courses. IIT Kanpur also has researchers working in computer science with an emphasis on the Sanskrit language, and they have produced various useful Sanskrit-related tools.

Sanskrit Research Institute

SRI is based in Auroville, India, use Sanskrit to create educational and research tools. SRI works has been active since 2011, completing a wide range of projects in the fields of Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature, and is now working on a variety of computational tools.

Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL)

Initiated by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, TDIL focuses on developing multilingual knowledge resources and language technology. This includes balanced corpora and machine translation systems, benefiting numerous Indian languages, including Malayalam.

Sambhashana Sandeshaha

Sambhashana Sandesha is the world's largest multi-coloured Samskrit monthly magazine. Sambhashana Sandesha has been in print continuously since September 1994.

Sudharama-Sanskrit Daily

Sudharma is a daily newspaper published in Sanskrit in India.The newspaper is published in Mysuru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. Established in 1970, the paper is also distributed by mail.

SANSKRIT E-BOOKS

Here you will find eBooks on Sanskrit - Lessons, Guides, Primers, Dictionaries, and other resources for beginners learning Sanskrit, as well as Kavya, Nataka, and other topics.

Classical Language Toolkit(CLTK)

The CLTK offers a toolkit and resources for processing classical languages, including Sanskrit. It includes tokenizers, lemmatizers, and corpora of classical texts, making it useful for NLP tasks.

JNU

JNU conducts research and development in multiple fields of language technology for Sanskrit and other Indian languages. The department is currently focused on developing Sanskrit analytic tools for the Sanskrit-Hindi Translator (SaHiT).

INRIA-FRANCE

This website provides a variety of Linguistics services for the Sanskrit language, including a Sanskrit reader that converts Sanskrit text in various forms into Sanskrit banks of tagged hypertext. A variety of phonological and morphological techniques are also supplied. Since 2003, this website has provided public access to a variety of web services including the Sanskrit lexicon. It provides dictionary search, declension/conjugation, stemming, and sentence segmentation/tagging/parsing in Sanskrit. The site began as a collection of tools for utilising a digital version of the Sanskrit Heritage Dictionary, which Gérard Huet had created as a personal autonomous effort since 1996 as a Sanskrit-French dictionary intended as a miniature encyclopaedia of Indian culture.

Conclusion

The development of language resources for Sanskrit is a collaborative effort involving various institutions and initiatives. These resources not only support the advancement of language technology but also preserve and promote the rich linguistic heritage of Sanskrit.