Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Another major scholarly onl<strong>in</strong>e collection of Sanskrit is the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS), 61 which
provides access to a searchable collection of lemmatized Sanskrit texts and to a partial version of the
database of the SanskritTagger software. SanskritTagger is a “part-of-speech (POS) and lexical tagger
for post-Vedic Sanskrit” and it is able to analyze unprocessed digital Sanskrit text both lexically and
morphologically. 62 The DCS was automatically created from the most recent version of the
SanskritTagger database with a corpus chosen by the software creator Oliver Hellwig (the website
notes that this corpus had made no attempt to be exhaustive). The DCS was designed to support
research <strong>in</strong> Sanskrit philology, and it is possible to search for lexical units and their collocations from a
corpus of 2,700,000 words.
A variety of research has been conducted <strong>in</strong>to the development of tools for Sanskrit, and this
subsection reviews only some of it. The need for digitized Sanskrit lexicons 63 as part of a larger
computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics platform is an area of research for the Sanskrit Library, an issue that receives
substantial attention <strong>in</strong> Huet (2004). Huet’s article provides an overview of work to develop both a
Sanskrit lexical database and various automatic-tagg<strong>in</strong>g tools to support a philologist:
The first level of <strong>in</strong>terpretation of a Sanskrit text is its word-to-word segmentation, and our
tagger will be able to assist a philology specialist to achieve complete morphological mark-up
systematically. This will allow the development of concordance analysis tools recogniz<strong>in</strong>g
morphological variants, a task which up to now has to be performed manually (Huet 2004).
Huet also asserted that the classical Sanskrit corpus is extensive and presents computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics
with many analytical challenges.
In addition to the challenges Sanskrit presents for develop<strong>in</strong>g computational tools, the features of the
language itself make the creation of critical editions difficult. As Csernel and Patte (2009) expla<strong>in</strong>, a
“critical edition” must take “<strong>in</strong>to account all the different known versions of the same text <strong>in</strong> order to
show the differences between any two dist<strong>in</strong>ct versions.” 64 The creation of critical editions is
challeng<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> any language, particularly if there are many manuscript witnesses, but Sanskrit presents
some unique problems. In this paper, Csernel and Patte present an approach based on paragraphs and
sentences extracted from a collection of manuscripts known as the “Banaras” gloss. This gloss was
written <strong>in</strong> the seventh century AD and is the most famous commentary on the “notorious” Pan<strong>in</strong>i
grammar, which was known as the first “generative” grammar and was written around the fifth century
BC. One major characteristic of Sanskrit described by Csernel and Patte is that it is “not l<strong>in</strong>ked to a
specific script,” and while the Brahmi script was used for a long time, Devanagari is now the most
common. The authors reported that they used the transliteration scheme of Sanskrit for Tex that was
developed by Frans Velthius 65 where<strong>in</strong> each Sanskrit letter is written us<strong>in</strong>g between one and three
Lat<strong>in</strong> characters.
An <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>sight provided by these authors was how one problematic feature of Sanskrit texts—
namely, text written without spaces—was also found <strong>in</strong> other ancient texts:
61 http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/
62 For more details on this tagger, see Hellwig (2007); for one of its research uses <strong>in</strong> philology see Hellwig (2010).
63 The NEH has recently funded a first step <strong>in</strong> this direction. A project entitled “Sanskrit Lexical Sources: Digital Synthesis and Revision” will support an
“<strong>in</strong>ternational partnership between the Sanskrit Library (Maharishi University of Management) and the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (CDSL) project
(Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies, Cologne University) to establish a digital Sanskrit lexical reference work.”
http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/201007200.html
64 Further discussion of this issue can be found <strong>in</strong> the section on Digital Editions.
65 http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/devanagari/velthuis/