Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 31/05/2026For 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 · 22/05/2026This 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? 135
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 20/02/2026We 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 · 04/11/2025Dharmamitra 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 · 26/10/2025My 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/Ezxg9TwRf5gyoutu.beThe Goodman Lecture 32 | Buddhist Philology and AIYouTube video by Khyentse Foundation 012
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 27/07/2025Chatting with my colleague Zorg of the Dharmamitra team about our most recent platform update and the launch of DharmaNexus: youtu.be/cgF9NvnGXG8youtu.beChat About Dharmamitra Updates in 2025 and DharmaNexusYouTube video by Dharmamitra 020
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 26/07/2025dharmamitra.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.orgDharmamitra · a toolkit for the languages of the DharmaA toolkit for the languages of the Dharma 083
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 19/06/2025Dharmamitra 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 · 06/06/2025I 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 · 03/06/2025Thank you so much & yes I will be at the IABS too — looking forward to meeting up there! It would be great indeed. 110
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 03/06/2025Happy 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 · 03/06/2025I 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 · 02/06/2025sites.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.comDH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 · 26/05/2025The problem of academia.edu is that there are really absolutely no checks and balances. Arxiv.org at least prevents submission of atrocities like the IVC paper. I hope we can establish something like arxiv for humanities in the future…academia.eduAcademia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, ResearchersAcademia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests. 010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 26/05/2025The unwritten rules of what is “proper” or not in humanities academia are really opaque for me. My previous supervisors in Hamburg encouraged me to simply upload things to academia.edu so other people can cite it when it doubt. A proper preprint culture like arxiv.org might help humanities.academia.eduAcademia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, ResearchersAcademia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests. 021
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/05/2025The 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.comGitHub - dharmamitra/dharmamitra-stardict-dictionaries: Stardict Dictionaries based on Dharmamitra parallel data collection effortsStardict 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 · 01/05/2025… since the publications are there and can be read anyway. I know some people in Buddhist studies/indology who, after many years of writing, just decided not to submit their PhD. Of course, many things might be better said in a book than in an article, for sure. 020
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 01/05/2025I must admit that I find the article oriented culture of the STEM field I am moving in right now a bit more rewarding. It means earlier publications and more visibility and interaction with the wider research community. Plus, aborting a PhD might feel less like a failure… 120
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 25/04/2025Our 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.eduMITRA-zh-eval: Using a Buddhist Chinese Language Evaluation Dataset to Assess Machine Translation and Evaluation MetricsWith 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 · 18/03/2025I had a great time teaching a workshop on LLMs and AI technology for Asian studies at the AAS conference in Columbus, Ohio this year! 130
Reposted by Sebastian Nehrdichelisa freschi @elisafreschi.bsky.social · 09/03/2025The 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
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/03/2025Fortunately, anybody with some serious Sanskrit background would agree. That’s the irony of this paper: anybody smart enough to understand it (be it people with enough Sanskrit knowledge, or computer scientists who understand the theory), will also disagree with it. 010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/03/2025Still I believe it’s good to comment on it, so people who are looking up search engines or will Ask the LLMs of the future once they have digested this data, will have a more complete picture. 120
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/03/2025I had a very telling “conversation” with the author on another platform before, just as other people had. To summarize: my experience is that they are not interested in a scientific dialogue, these are well-funded politically motivated pseudoscientists. 110
Reposted by Sebastian Nehrdichelisa freschi @elisafreschi.bsky.social · 05/03/2025A 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.atIKGA 11411
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 04/03/2025The 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 · 27/02/2025The 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.comDay 1: AI and the Future of Buddhist StudiesYouTube video by Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley 140
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025Fighting over syllables will certainly continue in some form or the other, but I wouldn't bet my living on that. 010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025For Buddhist Studies, I do believe that there are great times ahead. Instead of being bogged down in minute questions about variant readings an the translation of individual terms, people will interact with content much more broadly than was possible before. 4/ 110
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025Philology and translation might remain as things that people will do "for fun" just like chess, where everybody accepts that machines do it better than humans, but humans still play it just because its great fun to do. 3/ 110
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025It might not happen tomorrow, but the overall trend is undeniable. I see a future where the old pattern of "one text specialists" will disappear -- scholars will have access to much more literature, can read quickly across large sections of material 2/ 100
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 22/02/2025Not 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 · 16/02/2025The Chinese to English data described here: aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-...aclanthology.orgMITRA-zh: An efficient, open machine translation solution for Buddhist ChineseSebastian Nehrdich, Marcus Bingenheimer, Justin Brody, Kurt Keutzer. Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International W... 000
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025Gemini 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 🔥🔥 261
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025Living 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 · 15/02/2025Here is the link to the chrome web store: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dharm...chromewebstore.google.comDharmamitra Sanskrit Analysis - Chrome Web StoreAnalyze Sanskrit text with Dharmamitra's tools for grammar analysis and translation 010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 15/02/2025The 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! 282
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/02/2025Dharmamitra 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 · 29/01/2025Chinese 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 · 25/12/2024Japan 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 · 25/12/2024My 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 · 21/11/2024I will be in Naples Nov 24-27 to present dharmamitra at this workshop: ow.ly/IH7O50UbG41 010
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 19/11/2024My 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 · 18/11/2024BuddhaNexus 2.0 is maturing and will be ready for release soon! This is going to be 🔥🔥🔥 1122
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 13/11/2024Dharmamitra 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.comChrome Web StoreAdd new features to your browser and personalize your browsing experience. 081
Sebastian Nehrdich @snehrdich.bsky.social · 09/11/2024I’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 NehrdichJoy Brennan @joybrennan.bsky.social · 09/11/2024Some 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. 6151