Devika Ajay Verma: Part-time. 2016 Qualified; 2018 December Proposal Accepted:
"Syntactio-Semantic Relationships with reference to Karaka Theory and Paninian Grammar and Their Influence on Question-Answer Systems Design in Indo-Aryan Languages."
Objective of the Proposed Research: To computationally investigate syntactio-semantic relationships between words of Indo-Aryan languages based on Karaka Theory and Paninian Grammar with the main object of study being Hindi:
- Identification of Syntactic Elements via Semantics create a computational framework for identification of karaka attributes, using lexical-syntax semantic analysis by textual processing algorithms and/or machine learning, with a specific application to Hindi queries.
- Influence on Query Processing in Hindi QA-Systems of such an identification to be studied as a comparison between this approach and the usual keyword-based approaches using suitable computational frameworks.
- Generalization to the family of Indo-Aryan langages to be explored through recursion of the first two objectives to one more language other than Hindi in the family.
Work so far: Objectives 1,2 achieved; 3 in the process of achievement. During the first publication, stronger results than expected for objective 3 were obtained, as noticed by the international research community: generalization to non-Indic langauges. A first-of-its-kind
karaka annotator developed. One publication, in the ACL Anthology, done. The next is in the process of a third revision.
Bhuvanesh Malik joined full-time in 2020 Feb and then the Covid19 Pandemic hit India. He spent rest of the year at his home (in Haryana) doing pre-quali coursework online for the second semester, and finally decided to quit before 2021.
Sabyasachi Shadangi, part-time, has just joined the PhD program in August 2022. Preparing for the qualis now. The topic is going to be in NLP and/or computational linguistics, and the thrust will be on low-resource languages. He has his second degree from WILP, BITS Pilani.
Annie Rajan, a PhD scholar registered under Prof. Ambuja Salgaonkar in UDCS, Mumbai University, has been a collaborator since 2018, working on Konkani Language NLP. She is in the final stages of completion, draft thesis submitted.