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7. ‘Aboutness’ and semantic knowledge: A corpus-driven analysis of Yajnavalkya Smriti on the status and rights of women

Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 127–146)

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Metadata
Title7. ‘Aboutness’ and semantic knowledge
SubtitleA corpus-driven analysis of Yajnavalkya Smriti on the status and rights of women
ContributorGopa Nayak(author)
Navreet Kaur Rana(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0423.07
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0423/chapters/10.11647/obp.0423.07
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightGopa Nayak; Navreet Kaur Rana;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-11-06
Long abstractThis essay establishes the use of computational methods to study the semantics of a historical corpus compiled from the ancient Indian text of Yajnavalkya Smriti. Although the use of corpora has been extended to the study of computational semantics, in addition to grammar usage and patterns of language, they have mostly been limited to word-sense disambiguation, structural disambiguation or analysing a semantic space in terms of calculating semantic distances and determining relations between words within a corpus. This study adopts the use of computational semantics on ‘aboutness’ and ‘knowledge-free analysis’ within a limited aspect of ‘aboutness’ based on the methodology of Philips (1985). The text-only corpus of this study comprises 36,000 words of verses of the Yajnavalkya Smriti text translated by Vidyarnava (1918; 2010) from the original Sanskrit to English. In this study, ‘aboutness’ and ‘knowledge-free analysis’ aim to find the semantics of collocations and bring out bias-free information on the inheritance rights and the status of women in ancient India as described in the text. The application of the ubiquitous yet rarely applied concept of ‘aboutness’ is used to derive semantics in an unprecedented manner from an ancient historical text.This research on ‘aboutness’, which has seldom been used in computational semantics (Yablo, 2014), opens up avenues for further research on corpus analysis for extracting semantic knowledge from ancient texts to minimise knowledge bias.
Page rangepp. 127–146
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Gopa Nayak

(author)
Professor at Ram Charan School of Leadership at MIT World Peace University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1327-9907

Dr Gopa Nayak has a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom and is currently serving as the Professor at Ram Charan School of Leadership, MIT World Peace University, Pune, Maharashtra. After completing her Masters in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, and receiving Honours in Psychology from Ravenshaw College, she continued her studies in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Her academic interests are focused on English Language Teaching Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Navreet Kaur Rana

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8039-7954

Ms Navreet Kaur Rana is a Research Fellow at the Jindal India Institute at O. P. Jindal Global University. Her research areas include cultural studies of India, anthropology of food and cultural analytics.

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