News
July 26, 2024: Announcing the launch of MITRA Search, MITRA Deep Research, and DharmaNexus
We are thrilled to announce the official launch of a number of new flagship capabilities: MITRA Search, MITRA Deep Research, and DharmaNexus. These tools represent a new era for Dharmamitra, offering powerful search, in-depth analysis, and intertextuality exploration coupled tightly with the existing capabilities of Dharmamitra. We invite you to explore them and see how they can help your research and study.
July 21, 2024: A note by CTO Sebastian about BuddhaNexus and the future prospects
With the upcoming launch of a lot of new features, among them the DharmaNexus database, I want to thank the key institutions that made the development of the open source initiative BuddhaNexus, which served as the first prototype of the system, possible. Without SuttaCentral, we would not have gotten off the ground. We inherited a significant part of the front- and backend codebase, and thanks to SuttaCentral's commitment to open source licensing under GPL, this was possible, and in fact even encouraged.
Of course, the development of BuddhaNexus was primarily possible because of the people creating it, and it is due to ven. Ayya Vimala's dedicated contributions in the early months, including them bringing in additional developers, that we could iterate so fast. Equally grateful I am to the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC TBTS), which funded parts of the BuddhaNexus development, gave valuable feedback, and a home deployed on Hamburg server infrastructure in this development phase 2019-2022.
When I left Hamburg in early 2023, maintaining two separate code-bases became unfeasible. The good news is that the core team of BuddhaNexus, supported by a new funding infrastructure, is now committed to making the actively maintained successor platform DharmaNexus a reality, which is a deeply-integrated intertextuality engine within the Dharmamitra ecosystem.
We are extremely excited about the future of the project, and we envision open collaboration and the establishment of intertextuality and semantic search infrastructure that will be in use for many years to come.
Of course, none of this would be possible without the people involved. Creating lasting infrastructure in digital humanities is a very challenging task. People who have the right set of qualities -- the intersection of knowledge of the classical primary languages, the necessary programming skills, and a deep interest and joy in working on such systems, are extremely difficult to find. We are more than blessed by the fact that a small but dedicated team has formed over the years that is willing to tackle these challenges again and again. This is absolutely not a given. 🙏
The archived BuddhaNexus codebase is here: https://github.com/BuddhaNexus/
Development of Dharmamitra, including DharmaNexus, is happening here: https://github.com/dharmamitra
August 2025: MITA at IABS Conference, Leipzig
We will present "MITA: New Research Tools for a Paradigm Shift in the Philological Study of Buddhist Texts Based on Machine Translation Technology" at the IABS conference in Leipzig. Please join our panel with Marcus Bingenheimer on Tuesday, August 12!
June 2025: Deep Neural Embeddings at Hanmun Lab Workshop
We presented "Is training deep neural embeddings worth the effort? A preliminary investigation of different representation methods for semantic similarity tasks in Buddhist Chinese and related languages of the Buddhist tradition" at the "Navigating Indra’s Net: Digital Approaches to Text Reuse-based Inter-textuality in Pre-Modern East Asian Texts" online workshop at the Hanmun Lab, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
June 2025: From Sthiramati to Dharmamitra at Keio University
We presented "From Sthiramati to Dharmamitra: Developing Digital Tools for a New Age of Philological Buddhist Studies" at the DH International Workshop at Keio University, Tokyo.
March 2025: Machine Translation for Asian Studies Workshop
We conducted a hands-on workshop on "Machine Translation for Asian Studies" at the Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Columbus, Ohio.
March 2025: MITRA Search at CEAL Technology Forum
We presented "MITRA Search: Building Information Retrieval Systems for Classical Asian Languages in the Age of AI" at the CEAL Technology Forum in Columbus, Ohio.
2025: MITRA-zh-eval Paper Published
Our paper "MITRA‑zh‑eval: Using a Buddhist Chinese Language Evaluation Dataset to Assess Machine Translation and Evaluation Metrics" has been published in the Proc. 5th Intl. Conf. on NLP for Digital Humanities (details).
December 2024: MITRA Search at Tokyo Symposium
We presented "MITRA Search: Exploring Buddhist Literature Preserved in Classical Asian Languages with Multilingual Approximate Search" at the International Symposium "Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities" in Tokyo, Japan.
November 2024: Dharmamitra Presentation in Heidelberg
We gave a presentation on "Dharmamitra" online for an audience in Heidelberg, Germany (recording).
November 2024: Dharmamitra Toolkit at Naples Workshop
We presented "Dharmamitra: Developing a Toolkit for Philological Work on Premodern Asian Low-Resource Languages" at a workshop at L'Orientale University of Naples, Italy.
October 2024: MITRA at Johns Hopkins University
We presented "MITRA: Beyond Just Machine Translation for Premodern Asian Low Resource Languages" at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
October 2024: Dharmamitra Search at UC Berkeley
We presented "Dharmamitra Search: Leveraging Multilingual Language Models for Search and Detection of Textual Reuse across Diverse Text Collections" at the AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies Conference at UC Berkeley.
October 2024: ByT5-Sanskrit Paper Published
Our paper "One Model is All You Need: ByT5-Sanskrit, a Unified Model for Sanskrit NLP Tasks" has been published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (details).
August 2024: MITRA at PNC 2024, Seoul
We presented "MITRA: Developing Language Models for Machine Translation and Search in Buddhist Source Languages" at the PNC 2024 Annual Conference in Seoul, Korea.
2024: Breakthroughs in Tibetan NLP & Digital Humanities
Our paper "Breakthroughs in Tibetan NLP & Digital Humanities" has been published in the Revue d’Études Tibétaines (details).
April 2024: Massive Multilingual MT and Search at NTU, Taipei
We presented "Massive Multilingual Machine Translation and Search for Buddhist Languages: The Mitra Project" at National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan.
March 2024: Dharmamitra at National University of Singapore
We presented "Dharmamitra: Enabling Massive Multilingual Machine Translation for Ancient Languages of the Buddhist Tradition" at the National University of Singapore.
February 2024: Sanskrit MT & LLMs at Auroville
We gave an online presentation on "Machine Translation and LLM-Powered Grammatical Explanation for Sanskrit" at the International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Conference in Auroville, India.
2023: Intertextuality of Abhidharma Texts Paper
Our paper "Observations on the Intertextuality of Selected Abhidharma Texts Preserved in Chinese Translation" has been published in the journal Religions (details).
2023: MITRA-zh Paper Published
Our paper "MITRA‑zh: An efficient, open machine translation solution for Buddhist Chinese" has been published in the Proceedings of the Joint 3rd Intl. Conf. on NLP for Digital Humanities & 8th IWCLUL (details).
June 2023: MITRA NLP Tools in Hong Kong
We presented "MITRA: Developing Natural Language Processing Tools for the Languages of Buddhist Literature" in Hong Kong.
June 2023: MT for Buddhist Texts in Seoul
We presented "Developing Machine Translation for ancient Buddhist texts in canonical languages" in Seoul, Korea.
April 2023: Shared Semantic Vector Space in Vienna
We presented "Creating a Shared Semantic Vector Space for Buddhist Languages" in Vienna, Austria.