Chandojnanam: A Sanskrit Meter Identification and Utilization System
This work addresses the need for automated meter identification and correction in Sanskrit texts, which is incremental as it builds on existing OCR and sequence matching techniques for a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of identifying and utilizing Sanskrit meters (Chanda) by developing Chandojñānam, a web-based system that identifies meters from text or images, supports fuzzy matching for approximate matches, and enables meter-based correction of digital corpora, with the system publicly available online and as an open-source Python library.
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/.