The report of the Third International Sanskrit Computational Symposium held at UNiversity of Hyderabad from 15th - 17th Jan 2009

Background: In order to exchange the work with other reserachers working in the area of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, and also to discuss about the interoperability issues in order to exchange the linguistic resources, it was decided to hold the first symposium cum workshop on the Sanskrit Computational Linguistics at INRIA, Rocuencourt, Paris area in October, 2007. The symposium was hosted by Gerard Huet. Though being the first symposium, it could attract a good gathering of around forty researchers from Europe, Canada, USA and India. Prof. Paul Kiparsky delivered the first keynote speech. The response was very encouraging, and as a surprise, Peter Scharf proposed to hold the second symposium at Brown, though the second was planned to be held at Hyderabad. This second symposium at Brown University also attracted the researchers from other areas of research such as OCR, text image alignment, digital lexical resources, etc. Again there were around 30 scholars from Europe, Canada, USA, Thailand and India. Prof. George Cardona gave the inaugural speech.

After the successful events at INRIA, France and Brown, USA, it was decided to hold the symposium at Hyderabad from 15th - 17th Jan 2009, in collaboration with INRIA, France.

We received 16 submissions out of which 9 were shortlisted by the Program Committee for oral presentation. Prof. S. D. Joshi, an authority on Ashtadhyayi readily agreed to give a keynote speech on 'the background of Ashtadhyayi'. Prof. Houben, from Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, France delivered an invited speech on "A construction Grammar approach to Paninian Grammar and its Computerisation". Prof. K V Ramkrishnamacharyulu , Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, Tirupati delivered the invited speech proposing a tagging scheme for annotation of Sanskrit texts.

In order to provide a glimpse of 'vidvat sabhaa' -- a gradually diminishing tradition -- to the modern scholars, a vidvat sabhaa on 'vaakyaartha vichaara' was organised. Prof. Prahladachar chaired the session and conducted the Vidvat Sabha. The Sabha started with the positions of naiyayika, meemaansaka and a vaikarana, followed by the answers to the objections raised by different schools, and finally the answers to the objections raised by other scholars and delegates. . The delegates were benefitted by the debate among the three schools of thought in Indian tradition -- vyaakarana, nyaaya and miimaansaa.

Hyderabad deserves a special mention, as it is here, some 40 years back, an automatic device to generate word forms following Panini's Ashtaadhyaayi was conceptualised by a session Judge Vachaspati Gunderao Harkare. The machine, though not in working condition, is preserved by his student. His student with the help of a power point presentation, could mimic the working of the machine for the benefit of scholars.

Sanskrit Computational Linguistics being a field where various software tools are being developed by various groups all over the world, special sessions were reserved for the demonstrations of various software tools by their developers.

Finally the last day discussion on standardisation was taken up. It was a general observation that though different schemes for input, output and processing are being followed, there is a growing concern among the developers to provide the input and output facility for various schemes that are being followed. As long as the inputs and outputs are convertible from one scheme to the other without any ambiguity, the scheme one adapts for internal processing is not an issue. The advantages of following phonemic scheme over the existing Unicode / ISCII were also pointed out.

The symposium was attended by around 140 scholars of which 12 were from abroad, around 80 from India and 20 from the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad and around 30 from the University. The delegates were from diverse fields such as traditional Sanskrit scholars, Sanskrit teachers, linguists, computer scientists, computational linguists, mathematicians and Sanskrit lovers.

The proceedings of the symposium are published by the Springer as a Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 5406 and were made available to the registered delegates. For the benefit of Sanskrit scholars we also brought the Sanskrit translations of the abstracts of the submissions. We thank Sanskrit Academy for the translations as well as the publications of the Sanskrit abstracts.

The Sanskrit Computational Linguistics being inter-disciplinary in nature, delegates expressed a need to hold pre-conference tutorials for the benefit of Sanskrit scholars as well as the modern scholars. The students were very much enthusiastic about the new emerging discipline and also expressed a need to have a foundation course in the Sanskrit computational Linguistics. Prof. S. D. Joshi, who was hesitant about accepting our request for delivering the keynote speech, at the end of the symposium, was very happy to see the scholars from various disciplines sharing the common platform and exchaning their reserach findings. He was also pleased with the developments in the new discipline, and also suggested few topics such as the meta languages in various schools of thought. It was decided to hold the symposium biennially. Dr. Girish Nath Jha volunteered to hold the symposium at Delhi in Dec 2010. To encourage the participation of Sanskrit scholars in the field of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, it was decided to accept the papers in Sanskrit language as well. Sanskrit Academy has volunteered to translate the abstracts of the papers in English into Sanskrit, and the abstracts of the papers in Sanskrit into English. It was also decided to hold a tutorial every alternate year for the benefit of scholars providing an exposure to the new emerging areas in Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. Thus we plan to hold a tutorial in Dec 2009 which will be colocated with ICON 09, at Hyderabad.

The symposium was funded by University of Hyderabad, INRIA France, LDC-IL- CIIL, Mysore, Sanskrit Academy, and the Ministry of Information Technology, Govt of India.