Natural Language Processing: A Paninian Perspective

This book presents a Paninian perspective towards natural language processing. It has three objectives: (1) to introduce the reader to NLP, (2) to introduce the reader to Paninian Grammar (PG) which is the application of the original Paninian framework to the processing of modern Indian languages using the computer, (3) to compare Paninian Grammar (PG) framework with modern Western computational grammar frameworks. Indian languages like many other languages of the world have relatively free word order. They also have a rich system of case-endings and post-positions. In contrast to this, the majority of grammar frameworks and designed for English and other positional languages. The unique aspect of the computational grammar describes here is that it is designed for free word order languages and makes special use of case-endings and post-positions. Efficient parsers for the grammar are also described. The computational grammar is likely to be suitable for other free word order languages of the world. Second half of the book presents a comparison of Paninian Grammar (PG) with existing modern western computational grammars. It introduces three western grammar frameworks using examples from English: Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), and Government and Binding (GB). The presentation does not assume any background on part of the reader regarding these frameworks. Each presentation is followed by either a discussion on applicability of the framework to free word order languages, or a comparison with PG framework. Key Features A salient feature of this book is that the reader/researcher can study from one source the path-breaking research on Natural Language Processing using the classic and time-tested Paninian framework. Table Of Contents Introduction to NLP Language Structure and Language Analyzer Word and Their Analyzer Local Word Grouping Paninian Grammar Paninian Parser Machine Translation Lexical F