The Paris-Rocquencourt Research Center of INRIA (French National Institute for Informatics and Automatics), the Department of Sanskrit Studies at University of Hyderabad and the NLP Department of the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha at Tirupati joined together to discuss the inter-operability issues and develop standards for various linguistics tools for the analysis of Sanskrit. The joint team (headed by Gérard Huet from INRIA and Amba Kulkarni from University of Hyderabad) decided to hold the First workshop in October 2007. It was also decided to open the meeting to outside researchers and to profit of the workshop to organize the First International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium at this occasion. The symposium was hosted by Gérard Huet at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt from 29 - 31 October 2007, and led to the formation of the International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Consortium.

The First symposium was a success which was evident from the enthusiasm among the participants and also proposers to hold the second symposium. Thus it was certain that this activity was going to stay.

Peter Scharf, Director of the International Digital Sanskrit Library Integration project (IDSLI) at Brown University, hosted the Second International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium and Sanskrit Library Workshop at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA from 15 - 17 May 2008.

A formal Steering Committee consisting of Brendan Gillon, Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni, Malhar Kulkarni and Peter Scharf was formed to regulate the Symposium event.

The Third International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium 2009 was hosted by Amba Kulkarni from 15 - 17 January, at the University of Hyderabad.

Post-conference selected and edited papers from the First two symposia appear in LNCS 5402, the inaugural volume on Sanskrit Computational Linguistics in Springer's series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), a subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Proceedings of the third symposium appear in LNCS 5406.

Girish Nath Jha, the organising chair of the fourth symposium was inducted in the Steering Committee. The Fourth International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium was held from 10th to 12th December, 2010 at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, INDIA. The proceedings of this symposium appear in LNCS 6465.

The Fifth International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium was hosted by Malhar Kulkarni from 4th to 6th January, 2013 at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, INDIA.

Peter Scharf and Gérard Huet will host a seminar on Sanskrit syntax and discourse structures in Paris, June 13-15, 2013 and a workshop on computational Sanskrit syntax, 17-21 June 2013. Please see the announcement here.