Minamur Chowdhury

on Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing

 

 

ETEC 540—Research Paper

Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Sanskrit

"After early attempts at machine translation (which were based to a large extent on simple dictionary look-up) failed in their effort to teach a computer to understand natural language, work in AI turned to Knowledge Representation. Since translation is not simply a map from lexical item to lexical item, and since ambiguity is inherent in a large number of utterances, some means is required to encode what the actual meaning of a sentence is. Clearly, there must be a representation of meaning independent of words used. Another problem is the interference of syntax. In some sentences (for example active/passive) syntax is, for all intents and purposes, independent of meaning. Here one (illustration above) would like to eliminate considerations of syntax. In other sentences the syntax contributes to the meaning and here one wishes to extract it." (Rick Briggs, Artificial Intelligence —Sanskrit— The Age of Information — NASA — Knowledge Representation, Accessed Oct. 2005).

"The extraordinary thing about Sanskrit is that it offers direct accessibility to anyone to that elevated plane where the two —mathematics and music, brain and heart, analytical and intuitive, scientific and spiritual— become one" Whitehead's Modes of Thought speaks highly of language: "...The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind." (Sanskrit and the Technological Age, V. Houston, Accessed Oct. 2005) .

"One of the main differences between the Indian approach to language analysis and that of most of the current linguistic theories is that the analysis of the sentence was not based on a noun-phrase model with its attending binary parsing technique but instead on a conception that viewed the sentence as springing from the semantic message that the speaker wished to convey. In its origins, sentence description was phrased in terms of a generative model: From a number of primitive syntactic categories (verbal action, agents, object, etc.) the structure of the sentence was derived so that every word of a sentence could be referred back to the syntactic input categories. Secondarily and at a later period in history, the model was reversed to establish a method for analytical descriptions. In the analysis of the Indian grammarians, every sentence expresses an action that is conveyed both by the verb and by a set of "auxiliaries".

The verbal action (Icriyu- "action" or sadhyu-"that which is to be accomplished,") is represented by the verbal root of the verb form; the "auxiliary activities" by the nominals (nouns, adjectives, indeclinables) and their case endings (one of six)." (Rick Briggs, NASA on Sanskrit, Artificial Intelligenc).

As shown above, the main item in which two lines of an idea come together that has separate elements, each offers non-metrical form of a written language with action and oral action, concedes, the same set multiplied by three as what follow from decomposition of today's digital semantic network used in units, arches, and labels.

"It is interesting to reflect concerning, why Hindus have found costing to pursue researches in unequivocal coding a natural language in semantic elements. It forces to think of them as programmers without hardware, but the possible explanation consists that search of clear, unequivocal understanding is congenital to the person." (Rick Briggs, NASA — Knowledge Representation, Accessed Oct. 2005).

"The extraordinary thing about Sanskrit is that it offers direct accessibility to anyone to that elevated plane where the two —mathematics and music, brain and heart, analytical and intuitive, scientific and spiritual— become one" Whitehead's Modes of Thought speaks highly of language: "...The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind." (Sanskrit and the Technological Age, V. Houston, Accessed Oct. 2005) .

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© 2005 ETEC 540, MET, UBC

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