Framework for Question-Answering in Sanskrit through Automated
  Construction of Knowledge Graphs
Hrishikesh Terdalkar Arnab Bhattacharya
Sanskrit (sa\d{m}sk\d{r}ta) enjoys one of the largest and most varied
literature in the whole world. Extracting the knowledge from it, however, is a
challenging task due to multiple reasons including complexity of the language
and paucity of standard natural language processing tools. In this paper, we
target the problem of building knowledge graphs for particular types of
relationships from sa\d{m}sk\d{r}ta texts. We build a natural language
question-answering system in sa\d{m}sk\d{r}ta that uses the knowledge graph to
answer factoid questions. We design a framework for the overall system and
implement two separate instances of the system on human relationships from
mah\=abh\=arata and r\=am\=aya\d{n}a, and one instance on synonymous
relationships from bh\=avaprak\=a\'sa nigha\d{n}\d{t}u, a technical text from
\=ayurveda. We show that about 50% of the factoid questions can be answered
correctly by the system. More importantly, we analyse the shortcomings of the
system in detail for each step, and discuss the possible ways forward.