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#                       The Sanskrit Heritage Platform                     #
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#                               Gérard Huet                                #
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# README                                        Copyright Gérard Huet 2018 #
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This platform aims at computer treatment of Sanskrit, in view of diverse
philological applications:
- statistics on corpuses, stylistic analyses, vocabulary computations
- establishment of concordance listings, morphology-driven search in corpus
- diachronic simulation and dialect features correlation of texts
- assistant for critical editions management
- compilation of digitalized corpus in a fully tagged Sanskrit Library.
It may also be used for interactive consulting of a Sanskrit Dictionary
with grammatical knowledge, on the Web, on a computer workstation,
or on a personal communicator device. 
Finally, it may be used as support for teaching the language.

This project is the follow-up of two previous stages. 

Gérard Huet started in 1994 the compilation of a Sanskrit to French lexicon
for indological use (Lexique sanskrit-français à l'usage de glossaire 
indianiste) as a personal project. By year 2017 it had grown to 10700 entries,
and the scope had changed. Various standards of completeness and of
consistency were enforced, and the algebraic structure of a bilingual
dictionary provided with grammatical annotations was progressively
established and enforced by computer tools.

Starting from 2000, this project became a central object of research 
on computational linguistics within Gérard Huet's research at the Paris
Center of the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
(INRIA). A systematic reverse engineering of the TeX source of the lexicon
produced a structured 
lexicographic database appropriate for making various computations. 

The first major contribution was the release in 2002 of the Zen toolkit
for lexical, phonological and morphological treatment of natural language,
a Pidgin ML library of finite-state machine tools. Zen was presented at
ESSLLI in Trento in August 2002, and at the same time released on Internet 
under the LGPL license. Zen, and its conceptual background the AuM model
of transducers with reversible regular relations, are independent of Sanskrit,
and thus a distinct Ocaml library was developed for Sanskrit specific
processing.

During the years 2005-2009, Zen was developed further as a vehicle for
a general paradigm of relational programming using effective Eilenberg machines.
This constituted the thesis research of Benoît Razet. 

From 2006 onwards, an international cooperation on Sanskrit Computational
Linguistics was started between INRIA and the Sanskrit Studies Department
at the University of Hyderabad, headed by Pr. Amba Kulkarni. The goal of this 
joint team is to develop inter-operable packages for the processing of 
Sanskrit corpus, as communicating Web services.

In 2011-2012, Pawan Goyal spent a post-doctoral year working with
Gérard Huet on the Sanskrit Platform. He contributed many new modules:
a regression analysis facility, a hypertext version of the Monier-Williams
Dictionary interfaced with the platform's grammatical tools, and a user-aid
facility allowing an annotator to augment on the fly the generative lexicon
for substantive stems missing from the Heritage Dictionary, but listed
in Monier-Williams.

In 2013, Pawan Goyal and Gérard Huet designed and implemented an innovative
new interface, sharing efficiently the segmentation solutions of
the platform reader, which may run by billions. This allowed a much more
productive use of the platform, that may now accommodate long sentences.

In 2017 A rehaul of the global architecture was achieved, separating
the production of linguistic data resources issued from the generating lexicon
and the platform Web services operations proper. The two packages
are available at git repositories, namely
git@gitlab.inria.fr/huet/Heritage_Resources.git
git@gitlab.inria.fr/huet/Heritage_Platform.git

In summer 2017 Idir Lankri spent his Master internship implementing
a Corpus Manager prototype, which is used by Gérard Huet to link
citations of the Heritage Dictionary to selected readings stored in the corpus.

May 21st 2018