Chandojñānam: A Sanskrit Meter Identification and Utilization System

Abstract

We present Chandojñānam, a web-based Sanskrit meter (Chanda) identification and utilization system. In addition to the core functionality of identifying meters, it sports a friendly user interface to display the scansion, which is a graphical representation of the metrical pattern. The system supports identification of meters from uploaded images by using optical character recognition (OCR) engines in the backend. It is also able to process entire text files at a time. The text can be processed in two modes, either by treating it as a list of individual lines, or as a collection of verses. When a line or a verse does not correspond exactly to a known meter, Chandojñānam is capable of finding fuzzy (i.e., approximate and close) matches based on sequence matching. This opens up the scope of a meter based correction of erroneous digital corpora. The system is available for use at https://sanskrit.iitk.ac.in/jnanasangraha/chanda/, and the source code in the form of a Python library is made available at https://github.com/hrishikeshrt/chanda/.

Hrishikesh Terdalkar

Postdoctoral Researcher

My research lies in the intersection of Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Graph Databases 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 Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Retrieval, and Data Mining.