Rule conflicts occur when multiple instructions apply simultaneously
“What happens is at some steps in a derivation, you have multiple rules being applicable at the same time. What do you do in that case? Now, as I said, if you are producing a machine, then at that step, the human should not be allowed to choose. In a lot of cases, what happens is the human will quickly, as a native speaker or someone who's learned the language, the language that is Sanskrit, you will try to think, oh, what is the correct answer?”
Rajpopat's next project decodes the archaic Rig Veda
“So right now I'm working on the Rig Veda, which is the oldest surviving Indo-European composition. It's an anthology of Indo-European poems written in Sanskrit, in archaic Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit, and it also happens to be, as you can imagine, the earliest religious treatise of the Hindus. Yes, and so that is yet another composition that receives a lot of praise.”
Sanskrit morphology handles heavy lifting within the word
“In the case of Sanskrit, a lot of that work happens within the peripheries. So there is an affix and often there is an infix and so on. So for example, in English, we say, I would have done in Sanskrit, all of that would have been... all of that gets squeezed into one word. So a lot of the action happens within the word.”
Centuries of commentary misinterpreted Panini’s meta-rule
“The tradition interpreted later as the rule that comes later in the serial order of rules, and there are 4,000 of them arranged in a particular traditional order, which is Pāṇini's own order. That created many problems, and the first person to notice that was Kātyāyāna, the guy who wrote those pithy notes, if you remember. And so, right from the first commentator's time, a lot of problems arose, and he was already crafty enough to sort of start trying to fix those problems.”
Panini’s grammar is a generative linguistic machine
“In Pāṇini's case, his goal was not to describe language or to produce a conventional grammar either. When we say Pāṇini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit, which is an ancient Indo-European language, what he was doing is he was trying to build a linguistic machine. And what is the idea of this machine? It's an ambitious theoretical project, but it's a great idea because it seeks to represent linguistic information or language itself in mechanical terms, in mechanistic terms.”
“In the event of a conflict, apply the rule that comes later, going from left to right, because we write Sanskrit from left to right. So, the rule that comes later, as in the operation that applies to the right hand side part, the right hand, the right most part basically, if there are more than two rules. If the word contains two parts, X and Y, if it's X plus Y, if that's what the word is, then the rule that applies to Y wins, because Y comes later when we pronounce the word.”
Elegance and simplicity are hallmarks of true genius
“I think this is only one of many examples that we have access to as human beings, as the broad sort of global civilization that we've now become, of the fact that simplicity and elegance in presenting a complex web of information is what constitutes genius and not complexity. I mean, that also is really a commentary on what we consider to be a legitimate proxy of genius and intelligence.”
Rule-based algorithms differ from statistical machine learning
“This is an algorithm that Pāṇini has devised. What is an algorithm? It is a clear set of instructions, so that you might be able to always achieve the desirable outcome. So every machine has to have an algorithm. And in mechanics, if we are to use this machine metaphor, the fact is Pāṇini had created what I call a perfect algorithm to tackle the problem of rule conflict, which was misunderstood right from the first commentator's time.”
