[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit in ChatGPT
Oliver Hellwig
hellwig7 at gmx.de
Tue Nov 28 09:28:48 UTC 2023
Dear all,
a late addition to this discussion: please keep in mind that the
baseline against which to compare the output of ChatGPT (or whatever AI
tool) is not the Pandit or scholar who has studied Sanskrit for a
lifetime. Instead, it's a person who has heard a few hours of Sanskrit,
without really understanding what is said; has not received any formal
training in Sanskrit grammar; and is then asked to compose a short love
story. Under these circumstances, the results are IMO quite impressive
(try to replicate this yourselves for any language you don't know).
What may perhaps be interesting for future research is to see whether
the errors made by these systems are in some way related to linguistic
phenomena found in non-standard Sanskrit.
Best, Oliver
On 28/11/2023 09:19, Ananya Vajpeyi via INDOLOGY wrote:
> :) :) :)
>
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 1:27 PM Valerie Roebuck
> <vjroebuck at btinternet.com <mailto:vjroebuck at btinternet.com>> wrote:
>
> I don’t think we have a great deal to worry about while it produces
> a love story about a young lady with more than two eyes.
>
> Valerie J Roebuck
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On 28 Nov 2023, at 03:11, Ananya Vajpeyi via INDOLOGY
>> <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> To my mind, the more pressing question is whether AI will
>> imminently obviate our work as teachers, linguists, translators
>> and philologists, and render us completely redundant in any sort
>> of pedagogical role.
>> AV.
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 8:13 AM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY
>> <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Minor clarification. The examples I gave are from Google
>> Translate not ChaptGPT but clearly what you say makes sense to
>> that also.
>> I'm wondering how does an AI application learn how to
>> translate a language. Do human beings program in a bunch of
>> translation rules of how to translate language x to language
>> y and then these human beings refine the rules over time. Or
>> is there a kind of general artificial intelligence programmed
>> into a computer that is just fed thousands of sentences and
>> their translations and from that it learns how to translate
>> language x to language y and with more sentences fed in, it
>> itself refines its translation ability.? In other words
>> learning language translation almost like a human being, by
>> practice.
>>
>> Harry Spier
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 5:39 PM Antonia Ruppel
>> <antonia.ruppel at gmail.com <mailto:antonia.ruppel at gmail.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> The use of the past active participle to render the
>> English past active is to be expected: it’s the
>> standard/most common way to render the past tense in
>> modern/spoken Sanskrit as taught eg by Samskrta Bharati,
>> and I assume that that’s the sort of Sanskrit that ChatGPT
>> is trained on. Not applying external sandhi also is not
>> uncommon in modern Sanskrit, at least as used by those who
>> aren’t complete masters of the language the way eg Madhav is.
>>
>> Antonia
>>
>> On Mon 27 Nov 2023 at 23:29, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY
>> <indology at list.indology.info
>> <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
>>
>> Madhav wrote:
>>
>> I hear that students are already beginning to use
>> Google-Translator to do their Sanskrit homework.
>>
>> I just did a little experiment. Taking a few of the
>> english translations in Apte's "The Student's Guide
>> to Sanskrit Composition" and comparing what Google
>> Translator gave as a sanskrit translation of these,
>> and comparing to the original sanskrit quotes . A
>> couple of surprising things stood out. Surprising
>> because these are fundamental things nothing subtle.
>> Google translator seems to use sanskrit past active
>> participle to translate english simple past. It
>> doesn't seem to apply visarga sandhi, a completely
>> mechanical process.
>>
>> In these examples, the yellow highlighted sanskrit is
>> the citation from Apte, the blue highlighted sanskrit
>> is the google sanskrit translation of Apte's english
>> translation given below.
>>
>> Rama saw govinda
>>
>> rāmo govindamapaśyat
>>
>> rāmaḥ govindaṁ dṛṣṭavān
>>
>>
>> I Salute the parents of the universe, Parvati and
>> Paramesvara.
>>
>> jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau
>>
>> viśvasya mātāpitarau pārvatīṁ parameśvaraṁ ca namāmi
>>
>>
>> He washed his hands and feet.
>>
>> hastau pādau cākṣālayat
>>
>> saḥ hastapādau prakṣālitavān।
>>
>>
>> She shut her eyes
>>
>> sā locane nyamīlayat |
>>
>> sā netrāṇi nimīlitavatī
>>
>>
>> So says the revered Shankara
>>
>> iti śrīśaṁkārācāryāḥ |
>>
>> tathā vadati pūjyaḥ śaṅkaraḥ।
>>
>>
>> Thou art, therefore, a friend.
>>
>> tasmāt sakhā tvam asi
>>
>> tena tvaṁ mitram asi
>>
>>
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>> --
>> *Ananya Vajpeyi*
>> https://www.csds.in/ananya_vajpeyi
>> <https://www.csds.in/ananya_vajpeyi>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
> *Ananya Vajpeyi*
> https://www.csds.in/ananya_vajpeyi <https://www.csds.in/ananya_vajpeyi>
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