Āyurjñānam: Exploring Āyurveda using Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

The Bṛhat-Trayī, consisting of Carakasaṃhitā, Suśrutasaṃhitā, and Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya, is an encyclopaedic reference set in Āyurveda. However, the need for simpler texts led to the emergence of the Laghu-Trayī that includes Mādhavanidāna, Śārṅgadharasaṃhitā, and Bhāvaprakāśa. Authored by Ācārya Bhāvamiśra in the 16th century CE, Bhāvaprakāśa is a comprehensive work focused on medicine. The classification system of varga in its nighaṇṭu section, Bhāvaprakāśanighaṇṭu, categorizes substances based on type, origin, and medicinal properties. This valuable resource assists practitioners and researchers in Āyurveda. We present this information in an accessible manner to promote wider utilization of this knowledge. We create a robust ontology to capture the semantic information of medicinal substances, designing user-friendly interfaces for efficient annotation and curation, perform meticulous manual annotation on Bhāvaprakāśanighaṇṭu, and construct an accurate knowledge graph from three chapters of Bhāvaprakāśanighaṇṭu. The system is accessible at https://sanskrit.iitk.ac.in/ayurveda/.

Publication
National Youth Conference on Indian Knowledge Systems 2023.
[Best Poster Award]
Hrishikesh Terdalkar
Hrishikesh Terdalkar
Postdoctoral Researcher

My research lies in the intersection of Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Software Engineering with a particular emphasis on low-resource languages such as Sanskrit and other Indian languages. I am committed to pioneering NLP innovations that have a real-world impact. I enjoy building user-friendly GUIs and CLIs for various applications. My interests also include Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, and Machine Learning.