Sign in

Sebastian Nehrdich

@snehrdich.bsky.social
813 followers 397 following 57 posts

CTO of the MITRA project @BAIR, UC Berkeley. Research in ancient Asian low resource languages, especially text reuse, machine translation, semantic similarity search. Buddhist studies MA, now PhD in computational linguistics @Duesseldorf university.

PostsRepliesMedia
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
For anybody interested in a tentative dating of the sanskrit literature included at Dharmamitra.org, based on linguistic features and human estimated priors, grouped by categories!
052
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
This deserves attention! A whole book written by a Japanese Studies expert on a topic of Korean history relies heavily on AI tools for accessing the sources and acknowledges it clearly in the preface. Is this the kind of future we want for humanities?
125
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
We are happy to announce that Dharmamitra now features a board of advisors. They will advise on the kind of data that Dharmamitra includes, on the functionality and design of our applications, and on making sure that we keep providing tools and utility that really matter for our core audience.
030
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
Dharmamitra has recently seen the integration of the fantastic Digital Dictionary of Buddhism for Chinese and the equally great dictionary for Tibetan by Christian Steinert into the “English (explained)” translation mode!
061
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
My talk at the Khyentse Foundation Goodman lecture series about the relationship between AI and philological Buddhist Studies, and how Dharmamitra fits into this new emerging landscape: youtu.be/Ezxg9TwRf5g
youtu.be
The Goodman Lecture 32 | Buddhist Philology and AI
YouTube video by Khyentse Foundation
012
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
Chatting with my colleague Zorg of the Dharmamitra team about our most recent platform update and the launch of DharmaNexus: youtu.be/cgF9NvnGXG8
youtu.be
Chat About Dharmamitra Updates in 2025 and DharmaNexus
YouTube video by Dharmamitra
020
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 26/07/2025
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.org
Dharmamitra · a toolkit for the languages of the Dharma
A toolkit for the languages of the Dharma
083
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
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!
062
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
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...
030
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
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.
2150
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
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!
021
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
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.
sites.google.com
DH国際ワークショップ
2025年6月13日(金曜)10:45-13:30 慶應義塾大学三田キャンパス東館G-lab 同時通訳付き/ハイブリッド開催 参加申込みフォーム(無料、要事前申込み) 共催 科研費特別推進研究「デジタル研究基盤としての令和大蔵経の編纂―次世代人文学の研究基盤構築モデルの提示(JP25H00001)」 人文学・社会科学のDX化に向けた研究開発推進事業・研究基盤ハブ
020
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
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/...
github.com
GitHub - dharmamitra/dharmamitra-stardict-dictionaries: Stardict Dictionaries based on Dharmamitra parallel data collection efforts
Stardict Dictionaries based on Dharmamitra parallel data collection efforts - GitHub - dharmamitra/dharmamitra-stardict-dictionaries: Stardict Dictionaries based on Dharmamitra parallel data colle...
041
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 25/04/2025
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...
academia.edu
MITRA-zh-eval: Using a Buddhist Chinese Language Evaluation Dataset to Assess Machine Translation and Evaluation Metrics
With the advent of large language models, machine translation (MT) has become a widely used, but little understood, tool for accessing historical and multilingual texts. While models like GPT, Claude,...
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Cherry bloom in Sendai, Japan
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
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!
020
Reposted by Sebastian Nehrdich
elisa freschi @elisafreschi.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
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/
141
Reposted by Sebastian Nehrdich
elisa freschi @elisafreschi.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
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/
oeaw.ac.at
IKGA
11411
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
The world is trim enough these days. Here is the view of downtown San Francisco and the bay bridge taken from Kensington.
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
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...
youtube.com
Day 1: AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies
YouTube video by Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
030
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
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/
131
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
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 🔥🔥
151
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
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
040
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
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!
172
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
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!
1102
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
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 🔥🔥
150
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
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!
030
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
My talk on dharmamitra at the Heidelberg/Otani online lecture series is available on YouTube for those of you who are interested!
051
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
I will be in Naples Nov 24-27 to present dharmamitra at this workshop: ow.ly/IH7O50UbG41
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
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.
051
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
BuddhaNexus 2.0 is maturing and will be ready for release soon! This is going to be 🔥🔥🔥
1122
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
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!
chromewebstore.google.com
Chrome Web Store
Add new features to your browser and personalize your browsing experience.
081
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
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!
110
Reposted by Sebastian Nehrdich
Joy Brennan @joybrennan.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
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.
Screenshot of Buddhist classical Chinese text, talking about gender
6151
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
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...
piwheels.org
piwheels - dharmamitra-sanskrit-grammar
Sanskrit grammar processing using the Dharmamitra API
011
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
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
000
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
Out of this life and into the next You paid for this but they give you that
020
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 24/09/2024
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.
100
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 21/04/2024
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!
172
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 04/12/2023
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.
academia.edu
MITRA-zh: An efficient, open machine translation solution for Buddhist Chinese
Buddhist Classical Chinese is a challenging low-resource language that has not yet re- ceived much dedicated attention in NLP research. Standard commercial machine translation software performs poorly...
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 27/11/2023
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
researchgate.net
(PDF) Call for Papers Interdisciplinary Symposium on Machine Translation and Digital Humanities
PDF | With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLMs), and neural machine translation (NMT), technology has... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...
010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 16/11/2023
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.
monlam.ai
Monlam AI | སྨོན་ལམ་རིག་ནུས།
ཕྱི་ལོ་༢༠༢༣ ལོར་སྨོན་ལམ་བོད་ཀྱི་བརྡ་འཕྲིན་ཞིབ་འཇུག་ཁང་དང་། འབྲེལ་ཡོད...
140