arXiv Computation and Language By Tanay Agrawal

A Computational Approach to Measuring Semantic Change in Sanskrit Literature

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The paper evaluates whether diachronic word embeddings can track semantic change in Sanskrit, an ancient low‑resource language with complex phonological and morphological features. A 2.7‑million‑token corpus covering four canonical periods is processed with a neural sandhi splitter and lemmatizer, and per‑period embeddings are trained. Validation against a curated set of 21 historical shifts shows that 19 shifts align with philological expectations, supporting the method’s applicability to Sanskrit.

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