GPUs Help Researcher Decipher Ancient Sanskrit

With 10 verb tenses, eight noun cases, three grammatical genders and a strong predilection for compound words, Sanskrit is not an easy language to teach a human — let alone an AI model. But Indologist Oliver Hellwig is undertaking the challenge, training deep learning models that can analyze Sanskrit texts up to 4,000 years old. A digital repository of Sanskrit works parsed word by word would enable researchers to more easily search for information and better identify passages with parallel context. AI is being used to interpret historical texts in German and Italian, as well as classical Japanese literature. But most existing NLP models are geared towards Western languages that follow similar rules of grammar, punctuation and formatting.