2026 Indian Languages and Cultures Lecture

Context, from 7th century India to todayAndrew Ollett, University of Chicago An essential feature of modern language models is the ability to take context into account. A word’s meaning changes according to the words it accompanies.

Although the implementation of this concept is very new, the concept itself is very old — and in fact the earliest systematic account of contextual meaning comes from India of the 7th and 8th centuries, when the philosopher Prabhākara formulated a theory he called “the expression of relational meanings” (anvitābhidhāna).

This presentation will give an overview of Prabhākara’s theory, refined by the 8th/9th c. philosopher Śālikanātha, and its connections to ways of thinking about and modeling meaning in contemporary machine learning.