Chatting with my colleague Zorg of the Dharmamitra team about our most recent platform update and the launch of DharmaNexus: youtu.be/cgF9NvnGXG8

dharmamitra.org just saw a huge set of updates the last days: - Addition of MITRA Search - Addition of MITRA Deep Research Translation - Launch of dharmanexus at dharmanexus.org, You can learn more here: dharmamitra.github.io/dharmamitra-...

Dharmamitra got a significant update: We now feature fast OCR for Sanskrit, Tibetan, etc. powered by Gemini. You can upload images and PDFs. We also added an option to translate from files directly, instead of needing to go through OCR manually first!

I will be giving a presentation on the effectiveness of semantic similarity models for textual reuse detections in Buddhist source languages with focus on Buddhist Chinese in this great online workshop coming up at Bochum University! www.oaw.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/forschung/ha...

Happy to announce that I will be joining Tohoku University as tenure track assistant professor in autumn this year! My position will be at the intersection of Buddhist & Japanese Studies and machine learning / digital humanities.

I will be presenting the various MITRA tools and what exciting new features we will offer in 2025 at the IABS conference in Leipzig on Tuesday August 12 in this panel organized by Marcus Bingenheimer!

sites.google.com/view/dhws2025b I will be in Tokyo from the 12th to the 17th to talk about Dharmamitra and how we got to where we are now at Keio University.

The massive MITRA Sanskrit-Tibetan and Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary with more than 4M entries based on 600,000 sentence pairs is ready for public download! github.com/dharmamitra/...

Our comprehensive work on evaluation of machine translation quality for Buddhist Chinese, including comparision of different data augmentation statergies, is accepted at NLP4DH, proceedings will come soon: www.academia.edu/128624124/MI...

Cherry bloom in Sendai, Japan

I had a great time teaching a workshop on LLMs and AI technology for Asian studies at the AAS conference in Columbus, Ohio this year!

The author decides a priori that the Indus Valley seals represent a language and then decides that the language of the Indus seals is Sanskrit. Why? He can exclude all agglutinative languages (which include for them Sumerian and Dravidian etc.), because: 3/

A Summer school in Philosophical #Sanskrit: The 4th edition of the Vienna Summer School on the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia will take place in Vienna, Austria, from July 7 to July 12 2025. (Fees are ridiculously low: 100 E w/o accommodation or 400 w accommodation & breakfast) 1/

The world is trim enough these days. Here is the view of downtown San Francisco and the bay bridge taken from Kensington.

The recordings of the conference "AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies" held at UC Berkeley are finally online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JKd...

Not many people will like this but with the advent of AI/LLM technology, we are facing a future where philology and translation as a main profession for Buddhist Studies will quickly disappear or fade to the point of irrelevance over the next 10-20 years. 1/

Gemini 2 is perhaps the best available AI model out there that few people talk about. In our tests on translating Classical/Buddhist Chinese into English, Gemini 2 Flash + RAG augmentation is competitive to Claude 3.5 Sonnet while being more than a hundred times cheaper. Google is 🔥🔥

Living in the USA during the beginning of Trumps second term makes it much easier for me to understand how the McCarthy era could happen in a liberal democratic system

The Dharmamitra chrome extension also got a significant update. In addition to a better underlying model, It now supports multiple output languages. Just right-click on the dharmamitra icon, open "options" and then set it to the language you prefer. Enjoy!

Dharmamitra just got a whole lot better at just about everything, especially when it comes to translating into or out of non-English languages! It’s still not perfect but it now again beats claude etc. by a margin. Bigger update will come with new functionality in the coming days, stay tuned!

Chinese New Year's gift: MITRA will very soon significantly increase its capabilities across the board, including translation into modern Chinese. Its going to be 🔥🔥

Japan has always been very kind to me. In 2018, Tsukuba university invited me for a young scholars workshop, that was my first visit. From 2018-2020 I spent excellent years in Kyoto. Now I could come back for the 100 year celebration of the 大正大蔵経/30 years of SAT. ありがとう！

My talk on dharmamitra at the Heidelberg/Otani online lecture series is available on YouTube for those of you who are interested!

I will be in Naples Nov 24-27 to present dharmamitra at this workshop: ow.ly/IH7O50UbG41

My talk on dharmamitra, what it can do now and what it will be able to do in the future this week! Afaik it is going to be public, via the QR code in the announcement you should be able to join.

BuddhaNexus 2.0 is maturing and will be ready for release soon! This is going to be 🔥🔥🔥

Dharmamitra google chrome extension has landed! chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dharm... Select a piece of text, right click 'analyze with Dharmamitra', or alternatively click on the dharmamitra symbol in the extension bar. This also includes Sanskrit grammar analysis!

I’d love to work on Japanese research literature into English and into modern Chinese machine translation next for our MITRA project. Are there folks here interested to look into this problem, maybe searching for an internship? Get in touch with me if this sounds interesting!

Some eyebrows go up in serious Buddhist philosophy circles when one starts talking gender. But here's the old fellers talking about gender. This is from the Catuḥśatakavṛtti/大乘廣百論釋論, Dharmapāla's commentary on Āryadeva's root text. Taishō 1571.

For those of you who need to process Sanskrit for NLP purposes, here is a handy python package that enables access to our API: www.piwheels.org/project/dhar...

github.com/dharmamitra/... dharmamitra emacs extension is great fun! I am working on a chrome extension next to make it easy to translate inside the web browser

Out of this life and into the next You paid for this but they give you that

New publication @EMNLP 2024 Findings: One Model is All You Need: ByT5-Sanskrit, a Unified Model for Sanskrit NLP Tasks arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13920 New SOTA model for a number of Sanskrit NLP tasks: Word segmentation, lemmatization, and morphosyntactic tagging.

dharmamitra.org now provides access to our Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese to English, Sanskrit, Tibetan and Korean machine translation. Feel free to try this out!

Here is our paper on Buddhist Chinese machine translation from the draft proceedings: academia.edu/110240501/MITR… That discussion on H-Buddhism more than a year ago was a bit wild. I am happy that we finally have a publication on the curent state of MT for Buddhist Chinese out.

CfP: Symposium on Machine Translation and Digital Humanities (23-24 March 2024) @NUSingapore. Register for the FREE on-site event: Register for the FREE on-site event: forms.gle/m4ffq9i2xbmEHm…www.researchgate.net/publication/...es

If you want to try out the machine translation system we developed together with Monlam AI at UC Berkeley for Tibetan to English, just go to monlam.ai and create an account. Currently, the system is under high demand as we receive many thousand requests every day.