Paul Soma
2021
Semantics of Spatio-Directional Geometric Terms of Indian Languages
Sukhada Sukhada
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Paul Soma
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Rahul Kumar
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Karthik Puranik
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
This paper examines widely prevalent yet little-studied expressions in Indian languages which are known as geometrical terms be-cause “they engage locations along the axes of the reference object”. These terms are andara (inside), b ̄ahara (outside), ̄age (in front of), s ̄amane (in front of), p ̄ıche (back), ̄upara (above/over), n ̄ıce (under/below), d ̄ayem. (right), b ̄ayem. (left), p ̄asa (near), d ̄ura (away/far) in Hindi. The way these terms have been interpreted by the scholars of the Hindi language and handled in the Hindi Dependency treebank is misleading. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of these terms focusing on their triple – nominal, modifier and relational - functions and presents abstract semantic representations of these terms following the proposed analysis. The semantic representation will be explicit, unambiguous abstract and therefore universal in nature. The correspondence of these terms in Bangla and Kannada are also identified. Disambiguation of geometric terms will facilitate parsing and machine translation especially from Indian Language to English because these geometric terms of Indian languages are variedly translated in English de-pending on context.