Understanding Sanskrit : from Pānini's grammar to Eilenberg's machines

Sanskrit is the learned language of Indian civilization. It was fixed as early as the ^4th century B.C. by an exact formal grammar due to the scholar Pāṇini, who was not only a genius linguist but also a pioneering computer scientist.

Computer processing of Sanskrit required the development of sophisticated morpho-phonetic analysis algorithms using a relational programming methodology inspired by the work of mathematician Samuel Eilenberg and driven by Pāṇini's euphony rules. The talk will briefly present this methodology illustrated by computer processing of characteristic examples.

Biography

Gérard Huet is a computer scientist, logician and linguist, and a member of the Académie des Sciences. He has spent most of his career at Inria, where he is Director of Research Emeritus.

His main work has focused on type theory and its application to the mechanization of mathematics. He is notably the author of a unification algorithm for Church's typed lambda-calculus, an application algorithm for the representation of focused data structures (the "zipper") and the Zen linguistic toolbox. He is the creator of the Coq mathematical proof assistant.

For the past fifteen years, he has been working on the computerization of Sanskrit. He is the author of the generative dictionary "Héritage du Sanskrit" and the associated linguistic processing platform sanskrit.inria.fr.