Comparing Sanskrit Texts for Critical Editions

摘要

Traditionally Sanskrit is written without blank, sentences can make thousands of characters without any separation. A crit-ical edition takes into account all the dif-ferent known versions of the same text in order to show the differences between any two distinct versions, in term of words missing, changed or omitted. This pa-per describes the Sanskrit characteristics that make text comparisons different from other languages, and will present different methods of comparison of Sanskrit texts which can be used for the elaboration of computer assisted critical edition of San-skrit texts. It describes two sets of meth-ods used to obtain the alignments needed. The first set is using the L.C.S., the sec-ond one the global alignment algorithm. One of the methods of the second set uses a classical technique in the field of artifi-cial intelligence, the A* algorithm to ob-tain the suitable alignment. We conclude by comparing our different results in term of adequacy as well as complexity.