8 ms·

I admit I haven't read the paper, but as someone who works in NLP and is in a linguistics department I have to say that this claim seems absurd. Leaving aside w

I admit I haven't read the paper, but as someone who works in NLP and is in a linguistics department I have to say that this claim seems absurd. Leaving aside what "viable in NLP" means, all natural languages are rich in ambiguities, redundancies, and hazy polysemy that don't occur in, say, FOL used for knowledge engineering. And Sanskrit, being a natural language, is no exception. If it did turn out that Sanskrit were exceptionally well suited for something in AI, I'm willing to bet that either the domain of AI or Sanskrit (either the systems in its grammar, or our respect for it as a natural language that can only imperfectly be captured by a formalized grammar of it) would need to be so constrained in scope that this supposed exceptionality would seem rather cherrypicked. I'm not saying Sanskrit isn't cool (it's super cool), but I am saying we should resist insinuations that it's somehow more conducive to sophisticated thought or whatever.

stan_rogers 6y ago
Think classical Latin on steroids. Thanks largely to its scriptural use and Pāṇini's absolutely magisterial grammatical description meant mostly to protect the meaning of those scriptures, it was frozen in time at a much more rigid and inflected state than any of its Indo-European cousins. Classical Greek and Latin are slovenly and full of elisions and street usage - recreating infrequently-used grammatical cases using auxiliaries rather than endings/affixes, f'rinstance - by comparison. Grammatical precision in no way prevents the construction of meaningless or muddled utterances.
- marcthe12 6y ago
  I am curious about Avestan. It is dead and sister of Sanskrt.
  - srean 6y ago
    As an Indian I have enormous curiosity about Persian culture -- cousins somehow distanced by the force of history. I find so many similarities in language (well of course that's a no-brainer), traditional music, recipes. I met many Iranian people while I was a student in the United States. My experience has been so absolutely wonderful. I don't how much goodwill Iranians have towards Indians, but personally I have a lot towards them. Hopefully would be able to visit sometime. This was impossible while I was a student in US -- without burning bridges that is.
- lgessler 6y ago
  Sure, it's a fact of Sanskrit that of all the well-attested classical IE languages it's done the best job of preserving PIE's case system. But what's this have to do with the question of whether Sanskrit has some especial status as a tool for thought, AI, or whatever people are claiming in this paper and elsewhere? Is it that using inflection for indicating grammatical relations is somehow superior to using adpositions? I'd be very interested to hear an argument that makes the case for this for something more than aesthetics, but I can't imagine one myself.
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    It's that grammatical specificity that is the core - and, truth to tell, the entirety - of the argument, as if it makes Sanskrit somehow equivalent to Loglan/Lojban-type constructed languages or a purpose-built computer language. Well, that and the prevalent idea in some nationalistic circles that Sanskrit is the original, perfect language, and that everything else is just a corrupt, fallen version of it. It's wishful thinking. Woo. It's the Lysenkoism of linguistics.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
I did read the paper. It's vague, badly written and its main claim is not supported by significant evidence, either theoretical or empirical. First of all- what is the main claim of the paper? It's difficult to tell because it's not stated clearly at any point. There are a number of sentences in the paper that seem to be trying to claim something, but the author seems to be unclear himself what that something ought to be. For example, this sentence, in the abstract, seems to make a strong claim: This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old. If this is indeed the paper's main claim, then it is not supported by the rest of the paper. The paper starts with a description of one kind of semantic net (similar, but not identical to, a semantic net scheme proposed by Rumelhart and Norman as a model of human memory). It then describes a scheme for the formal semantic analysis of Sanskrit first proposed by Panini and his disciples in the first millenium B.C. The article then goes on to show a few cases where the Paninian semantic analysis of Sanskrit and English sentences coincides with the semantic analysis by the semantic net scheme chosen by the author (i.e. they yield the same triplets). The author finds multiple commonalities between the two kinds of analysis and concludes that they are equivalent. The paper concludes with some musings about the accomplishments of Indian linguists of Panini's line that he likens to "computer scientists without the hardware". An interesting thought, to be sure. However, a demonstration that a semantic analysis of a scant few sentences in two natural languages by two different methods (semantic nets and Paninian grammar) has similar results can not be accepted as proof that the two methods are equivalent, which really seems as what the author is trying to claim. At best it's evidence that there is an equivalence, but since this evidence consists of just a few sentences, it is really weak evidence. There is probably an infinite number of sentences that it is possible to construct in English and in Sanskrit- and a possibly infinite number of semantic parses based on the author's own chosen semantic net scheme, of each of those sentences. There's nothing to say that if we kept analysing English and Sanskrit sentences in the way the author shows, we would keep getting the same results he obtained. So to recap, the paper has a very vague main claim that is very loosely supported empirically by some examples that we have no way to know are representative. Like I say in another comment, I really can't understand how this passed peer review in AAAI. There is no chance that this would ever be published in AAAI today.

stan_rogers 6y ago

Think classical Latin on steroids. Thanks largely to its scriptural use and Pāṇini's absolutely magisterial grammatical description meant mostly to protect the meaning of those scriptures, it was frozen in time at a much more rigid and inflected state than any of its Indo-European cousins. Classical Greek and Latin are slovenly and full of elisions and street usage - recreating infrequently-used grammatical cases using auxiliaries rather than endings/affixes, f'rinstance - by comparison. Grammatical precision in no way prevents the construction of meaningless or muddled utterances.

marcthe12 6y ago
I am curious about Avestan. It is dead and sister of Sanskrt.
- srean 6y ago
  As an Indian I have enormous curiosity about Persian culture -- cousins somehow distanced by the force of history. I find so many similarities in language (well of course that's a no-brainer), traditional music, recipes. I met many Iranian people while I was a student in the United States. My experience has been so absolutely wonderful. I don't how much goodwill Iranians have towards Indians, but personally I have a lot towards them. Hopefully would be able to visit sometime. This was impossible while I was a student in US -- without burning bridges that is.
lgessler 6y ago
Sure, it's a fact of Sanskrit that of all the well-attested classical IE languages it's done the best job of preserving PIE's case system. But what's this have to do with the question of whether Sanskrit has some especial status as a tool for thought, AI, or whatever people are claiming in this paper and elsewhere? Is it that using inflection for indicating grammatical relations is somehow superior to using adpositions? I'd be very interested to hear an argument that makes the case for this for something more than aesthetics, but I can't imagine one myself.
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  It's that grammatical specificity that is the core - and, truth to tell, the entirety - of the argument, as if it makes Sanskrit somehow equivalent to Loglan/Lojban-type constructed languages or a purpose-built computer language. Well, that and the prevalent idea in some nationalistic circles that Sanskrit is the original, perfect language, and that everything else is just a corrupt, fallen version of it. It's wishful thinking. Woo. It's the Lysenkoism of linguistics.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

I did read the paper. It's vague, badly written and its main claim is not supported by significant evidence, either theoretical or empirical. First of all- what is the main claim of the paper? It's difficult to tell because it's not stated clearly at any point. There are a number of sentences in the paper that seem to be trying to claim something, but the author seems to be unclear himself what that something ought to be. For example, this sentence, in the abstract, seems to make a strong claim: This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old. If this is indeed the paper's main claim, then it is not supported by the rest of the paper. The paper starts with a description of one kind of semantic net (similar, but not identical to, a semantic net scheme proposed by Rumelhart and Norman as a model of human memory). It then describes a scheme for the formal semantic analysis of Sanskrit first proposed by Panini and his disciples in the first millenium B.C. The article then goes on to show a few cases where the Paninian semantic analysis of Sanskrit and English sentences coincides with the semantic analysis by the semantic net scheme chosen by the author (i.e. they yield the same triplets). The author finds multiple commonalities between the two kinds of analysis and concludes that they are equivalent. The paper concludes with some musings about the accomplishments of Indian linguists of Panini's line that he likens to "computer scientists without the hardware". An interesting thought, to be sure. However, a demonstration that a semantic analysis of a scant few sentences in two natural languages by two different methods (semantic nets and Paninian grammar) has similar results can not be accepted as proof that the two methods are equivalent, which really seems as what the author is trying to claim. At best it's evidence that there is an equivalence, but since this evidence consists of just a few sentences, it is really weak evidence. There is probably an infinite number of sentences that it is possible to construct in English and in Sanskrit- and a possibly infinite number of semantic parses based on the author's own chosen semantic net scheme, of each of those sentences. There's nothing to say that if we kept analysing English and Sanskrit sentences in the way the author shows, we would keep getting the same results he obtained. So to recap, the paper has a very vague main claim that is very loosely supported empirically by some examples that we have no way to know are representative. Like I say in another comment, I really can't understand how this passed peer review in AAAI. There is no chance that this would ever be published in AAAI today.