AI Magazine Volume 8 Number 2 (1987) (© AAAI)

CONFERENCE REPORT Knowledge Representation ancl Inference in Sanskrit

Rick Briggs

This conference is analogous to the ancient texts but little procedural consultation of philosophers and cog- information), we had to rely on the This report is a review of the First nitive psychologists by computer sci- pandits to whom the oral tradition had National Conference on Knowledge entists in the beginnings of AI. been passed. Representation and Inference in Western psychology and philosophy is The conference was inspired by Sri Sanskrit, Bangalore, India, 20 through quite different from the Indo-Aryan Paramananda Bharathi Swamiji and 22 December, 1986 The conference tradition: the former has its basis in was organized by Dr. H. N. Mahabala was inspired by an article that Aristotelian logic and the scientific (president, Computer Society of India; appeared in the Spring 1985 issue of method, whereas the latter is also chairman, Indian Institute of AI Magazine--“Knowledge based on introspection and internal Technology) and others. The confer- Representation in Sanskrit and experience Nevertheless, both these ence was attended by the vice-chair- Artificial Intelligence.” schools have converged in the analysis man of the University Grants’ of natural language and the extraction Commission and the secretary of the of the semantic message from a Department of Electronics. Virtually text.The purpose of AI in this context every institute of science, mathemat- is to derive a “method” for natural lan- ics and engineering was represented. guage understanding; the purpose for In addition, the conference was attend- the Sanskrit scholars was to under- ed by professors of Sanskrit and com- stand the nature of language and puter science from England (Oxford thought in and of itself. Hence, for the and Sussex universities) and the Sanskrit scholars, the actual methodol- United States. A working group has been created to ogy was implicit; it was not the focus. Papers were presented in three basic pursue the goals of the conference The purpose of the conference was groups. The first group of papers were and to possibly arrange another to extract this hidden “algorithm” of of an overview nature (of natural lan- conference for 1987 and 1988 automatic semantic parsing from the guage processing), such as the paper by Sanskrit pandits. One obvious barrier I. Mani of Texas Instruments. The sec- was language. Although the computer ond set of papers were purely Sanskrit. scientists attending the conference A third group (the most important) were bilingual, the pandits spoke no addressed the possibility of utilizing English. Each presentation was trans- the underlying Sanskrit methodology lated and presented in both English in natural language processing, such as and Sanskrit by various translators. In the paper by Srihari, Rappaport, and addition, the proceedings were issued Kumov of the State University of New in both languages. York at Buffalo concerning the use of The conference was preceded by two the semantic network processing sys- tutorials. The first tutorial was for the tem (SNEPS) for Sanskrit grammatical pandits. The magazine article men- analysis. tioned earlier was translated into The outcome of the conference was Sanskrit, and the pandits were given positive. Most importantly, the right an AI tutorial. The second tutorial questions were asked of the Sanskrit familiarized computer scientists with scholars, and findings will be made the vast Sanskrit literature on knowl- available in India, where such infor- edge representation. Because the mation was previously unavailable, for methodology has always been implicit future work of this kind. (examples of parsing are given in the

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