A Binary Schema and Computational Algorithms to Process Vowel-based Euphonic Conjunctions for Word Searches

Abstract

Comprehensively searching for words in Sanskrit E-text is a non-trivial problem because words could change their forms in different contexts. One such context is sandhi or euphonic conjunctions, which cause a word to change owing to the presence of adjacent letters or words. The change wrought by these possible conjunctions can be so significant in Sanskrit that a simple search for the word in its given form alone can significantly reduce the success level of the search. This work presents a representational schema that represents letters in a binary format and reduces Paninian rules of euphonic conjunctions to simple bit set-unset operations. The work presents an efficient algorithm to process vowel-based sandhis using this schema. It further presents another algorithm that uses the sandhi processor to generate the possible transformed word forms of a given word to use in a comprehensive word search.