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Presentations

Presentations

Dharmamitra: A data-driven platform for the research of Buddhist texts in multiple languages using advanced NLP methods

January 31, 2026

Forum, 第30回情報知識学フォーラム「文化と社会をとらえるデータサイエンスの最前線」 (The 30th Information and Knowledge Science Forum: Data Science at the Forefront of Capturing Culture and Society), Japan Society for Information and Knowledge (情報知識学会), Doshisha University Osaka Satellite Campus, Osaka, Japan

The forum brought together practitioners from Japan and abroad to share cutting-edge research at the intersection of data science, culture, and society, discussing methodology (reproducibility, validity), infrastructure (RDM, FAIR, open science), and ethics (governance, bias, copyright). I presented on Dharmamitra as a data-driven platform for researching Buddhist texts across multiple languages using advanced NLP methods.

AI and Indological/Buddhological researches: Dharmamitra/Dharmanexus and its Application

January 10, 2026

Conference, インド思想史学会 第32回学術大会 (Association for the Study of the History of Indian Thought, The 32nd Annual Conference), Kyoto University, Faculty of Letters Building, Lecture room 7, Kyoto, Japan (Face-to-face & Online)

Co-presented with Kengo Harimoto (University of Naples "L'Orientale"). Recent advances in AI are transforming many areas of scholarship, and the field of Indology is no exception. We introduced Dharmamitra, an AI-assisted research environment that provides advanced tools for philological work across the Classical Asian languages: Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. Through components such as MITRA Search, Deep Research, and the DharmaNexus textual database, Dharmamitra supports large-scale discovery of parallel passages and intertextual relationships across linguistic boundaries. The first half of the presentation outlined what Dharmamitra is, what kinds of data and models it relies on, and how its core tools work together. The second half presented a concrete case study on two folios of Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts from the oldest layer of the Nepalese manuscript collection (Gilgit–Bamiyan Type I script). Using Dharmamitra/DharmaNexus to search across Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese materials, we identified highly plausible textual matches: one corresponding to part of the text translated into Chinese as T 1335 大吉義呪經, the other aligning with a section of the Tibetan translation of the Akṣobhyatathāgatavyūha* (Tohoku 50), corresponding to Chinese T 310 大寶積經 book 6 and T 313 阿閦佛國經.

Translation, OCR, and Semantic Retrieval: Current Status and Future Outlook of the Dharmamitra Ecosystem

December 21, 2025

Symposium, 仏教学とデジタル・ヒューマニティーズ国際シンポジウム (Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities International Symposium), Tokyo, Japan

I presented on the current status and future outlook of the Dharmamitra ecosystem, covering translation, OCR, and semantic retrieval capabilities for Buddhist texts. The symposium was held at Tokyo International Forum Hall D5 and focused on "The Significance of Humanities and Research Infrastructure Development in the DX-AI Era."

Dharmamitra: A Platform that Makes Translation and Discovery of Buddhist Texts Possible Across Language Barriers

December 21, 2025

Symposium, 11th Symposium of Humanistic Buddhism, Taiwan

I presented on the Dharmamitra platform as part of the panel "AI in the Fo Guang Dictionary of Buddhism English Translation Project and MITRA." The panel showcased how emerging AI tools support large-scale Buddhist translation and lexicographical research. I introduced Dharmamitra as a collaborative AI-driven platform developed by Tohoku University with the Tsadra Foundation and Berkeley AI Research Lab, which employs Large Language Models for high-quality machine translation of Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese alongside vector-based semantic retrieval.

Building the Foundations of Buddhist Philology through Digital Humanities: Exploring the Potential of the Tohoku University Digital Archives (ToUDA)

December 03, 2025

Workshop, Workshop and Symposium, Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS), Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

I presented as part of the Digital Archive Research Unit at the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University. The workshop and symposium was co-hosted by CIJS, the Tohoku University Digital Archives Steering Committee, and the Tohoku University Library. I delivered a lecture and participated in a panel discussion on the digitization of academic resources in Tohoku University and new developments in Buddhist textual studies with AI technology.

From OCR via Machine Translation to Semantic Search: The Dharmamitra AI stack for Multilingual Buddhist Philology

November 25, 2025

Talk, 서울대학교 인공지능 디지털인문학센터 해외연구자 초청포럼 (Seoul National University AI Digital Humanities Center Overseas Researcher Invitation Forum), Seoul, South Korea

Mentioned in KADH news.

Machine Learning and Large Language Models in Buddhist Studies: The Dharmamitra Project

November 12, 2025

Talk, Goodman Lecture Series No. 32, Khyentse Foundation, Online

Recent advances in machine learning, particularly the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, are rapidly shaping new ways of accessing and interpreting knowledge preserved in textual form. This has far-reaching implications for the study of the Buddhist textual tradition. Applications once considered decades away, such as the fluent machine translation of Classical Tibetan or Chinese into English, are now commonly used by scholars at all levels, from early-career students to senior researchers. This talk will provide an overview of the tools that the Dharmamitra project currently offers the Buddhist Studies community, with a focus on machine translation and cross-lingual search for philological use cases. It will also introduce the underlying technical architecture of these tools and discuss both the capabilities and limitations of the current generation of language models for philological applications.

Dharmamitra & DharmaNexus: A New Set of Digital Tools for the Philological Study of Buddhist Texts

August 18, 2025

Presentation, ELTE BTK, Kodály terem, Budapest, Hungary

Traditional philological work on Buddhist sources often consists of laborious keyword searches across disparate corpora in multiple languages, followed by manual collation of parallels, a workflow that favours stamina over insight. Dharmamitra is an open-source platform that collapses those tasks to seconds using advanced computational and deep learning methods.

June 2025

Online workshop "Navigating Indra’s Net: Digital Approaches to Text Reuse-based Inter-textuality in Pre-Modern East Asian Texts" at the Hanmun Lab, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

This presentation is part of an online workshop on digital approaches to intertextuality in pre-modern East Asian texts. The talk will provide a preliminary investigation of different representation methods for semantic similarity tasks in Buddhist Chinese and related languages of the Buddhist tradition.

From Sthiramati to Dharmamitra: Developing Digital Tools for a New Age of Philological Buddhist Studies

June 2025

DH International Workshop at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

This presentation was part of a workshop at Keio University, co-organized by Kakenhi Special Promotion Research "Compilation of the Reiwa Daizokyo as a Digital Research Infrastructure - Presentation of a Research Infrastructure Construction Model for Next-Generation Humanities (JP25H00001)" and the Research Infrastructure Hub, Research and Development Project for the DX of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The workshop featured two lectures and a hands-on session by Sebastian Nehrdich: 1. "From Sthiramati to Dharmamitra: Developing Digital Tools for a New Age of Philological Buddhist Studies" 2. "Practical Application of the Various MITRA Tools for Philological Research"

The event explored the latest developments in the Dharmamitra project, which applies the extensive computing resources of the UC Berkeley AI Research Lab to the machine translation of Buddhist scriptures. In addition to a technical overview, the workshop also delved into the career path of Sebastian Nehrdich, from his beginnings as a Buddhist studies scholar to his current work in applied research, offering insights for early-career researchers in the humanities.

Machine Translation for Asian Studies

March 2025

Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Columbus, Ohio

With the advent of large language models, machine translation (MT) has become a widely used, but little understood, tool for research, language learning, and communication. GPT, Claude, and many other model series allow researchers now to access literature in different languages, and even translate primary texts composed in classical languages with few resources available. But how to evaluate the translation output of such machines? How to decide which model is the best for my own research purposes and how to tweak it? How will MT impact language learning, which is fundamental for Asian Studies?

In the first part of this session, we will give an overview of the MT landscape for Asian Studies. Participants will learn how to use online interfaces and APIs to access language models for their own research needs. We will discuss different types of prompts and user defined parameters such as temperature or token length. We will demonstrate that results can differ radically according to parameterization and prompting, both within the same model and between models.

In the second part we will present Dharmamitra (dharmamitra.org), an open-source model trained on low-resource languages relevant for Asian Studies. Using examples from Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Classical Chinese we will show how even difficult, ancient languages are slowly becoming tractable for MT and what caveats to consider when using such language models to translate them.

This is a hands-on workshop with exercises. Participants will have to bring their computers. Programming experience is not needed.

Organizers - Marcus Bingenheimer, Temple University - Sebastian Nehrdich, University of California, Berkeley

Chair - Marcus Bingenheimer, Temple University

Presenters - Marcus Bingenheimer, Temple University - Sebastian Nehrdich, University of California, Berkeley - Xiang Wei, Temple University

MITRA Search: Building Information Retrieval Systems for Classical Asian Languages in the Age of AI

March 2025

CEAL (Council on East Asian Libraries) Technology Forum, Columbus, Ohio

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have revolutionized information retrieval and question-answering systems. This talk introduces MITRA Search, a specialized search platform designed for exploring Buddhist literature preserved across Classical Asian languages including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pāli. The system leverages multilingual approximate search capabilities to enable scholars to identify parallel passages and conduct comparative analyses across different writing systems and translations. We demonstrate how large language models integrated into the Dharmamitra project enhance user interaction with search results, facilitating dynamic exploration of these classical texts. This innovation addresses the long-standing challenge of cross-linguistic textual research in Buddhist studies and offers new possibilities for digital humanities scholarship.

December 2024

Ito International Research Center, Thanksgiving Hall, Tokyo, Japan

Part of the International Symposium "Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities: 100 Years of the Taishō Tripiṭaka and 30 Years of SAT"

Session: Machine Translation and Buddhist Studies (15:30-16:30)

This talk will present MITRA Search, a system for exploring Buddhist literature preserved in classical Asian languages through multilingual approximate search capabilities. The presentation will demonstrate how this technology enables scholars to search across Buddhist texts in different languages and writing systems, facilitating comparative textual research and discovery of parallel passages.

Dharmamitra: Developing a Toolkit for Philological Work on Premodern Asian Low-Resource Languages

November 2024

Workshop: Case studies from current research projects - Conversations on Digital Scholarly Editing, Śivadharma Project Headquarters, Palazzo Giusso, L'Orientale University of Naples, Naples, Italy

This talk was presented as part of the workshop "Case studies from current research projects - Conversations on Digital Scholarly Editing" organized by Martina Dello Buono and Florinda De Simini at L'Orientale University of Naples.

Dharmamitra

November 2024

Online - via Zoom, Heidelberg, Germany

Recording available here

Sanskrit presents unique challenges for digital processing due to the language's rich morphological complexity and the absence of word boundaries in written texts. While recent advances in Natural Language Processing have revolutionized the study of modern languages and made applications such as machine translation and reliable search engines possible, Sanskrit so far is lagging behind in these developments. In this talk, I will present Dharmamitra's Sanskrit-specific capabilities, particularly our new language model that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in fundamental Sanskrit processing tasks such as word segmentation, lemmatization, and morphological analysis. I will demonstrate how these technical advances translate into practical tools for Sanskrit scholars – from assisting in basic text analysis to enabling sophisticated corpus-wide semantic search and machine translation. The talk will showcase examples of how our system can provide detailed grammatical explanations, annotated translations, and facilitate textual research via semantic search even across language boundaries. These tools are designed to serve both beginning Sanskrit students and advanced scholars conducting specialized research. I will also demonstrate how Dharmamitra's capabilities can be used as building blocks for Sanskrit digitization and annotation projects.

MITRA: Beyond Just Machine Translation for Premodern Asian Low Resource Languages

October 2024

Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Baltimore, MD, USA

Recent years saw the rise of multilingual language models that achieve high levels of performance for a large number of tasks, with some of them handling hundreds of languages at once. Premodern languages are usually underrepresented in such models, leading to poor performance in downstream applications. The Dharmamitra project aims to develop a diverse set of language models to address these shortcomings for the classical Asian low-resource languages Sanskrit, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, and Pali. These models provide solutions for low-level NLP tasks such as word segmentation and morpho-syntactic tagging, as well as high-level tasks including semantic search, machine translation, and general chatbot interaction. The talk will address the individual challenges and unique characteristics of the data involved, and the strategies deployed to address these. It will also demonstrate how these different tools can be combined in an application that goes beyond simple sentence-to-sentence machine translation, providing detailed grammatical explanations and corpus-wide search to support both early-stage language learners and experienced researchers with specific demands.

Dharmamitra Search: Leveraging Multilingual Language Models for Search and Detection of Textual Reuse across Diverse Text Collections

October 2024

AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies Conference, Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

MITRA: Developing Language Models for Machine Translation and Search in Buddhist Source Languages

August 2024

PNC 2024 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, Seoul, Korea

Translation and search are among the fundamental problems when researching the textual source material of Buddhist traditions. MITRA has successfully developed machine translation models to ease the access to this material. When it comes to search, The Dharmamitra project approaches this problem by using semantic embeddings that enable search on related passages in different languages, regardless of whether the answer to the query is found in a text preserved in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Chinese. In addition to providing researchers with this powerful search system, Dharmamitra also provides a system for the automatic detection of similar text passages within the same language and across different languages. In my talk, I will demonstrate how these tools are designed and how researchers can access them and integrate them in their workflow.

Massive Multilingual Machine Translation and Search for Buddhist Languages: The Mitra Project

April 2024

National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan

Dharmamitra: Enabling Massive Multilingual Machine Translation for Ancient Languages of the Buddhist Tradition

March 2024

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Machine Translation and LLM-Powered Grammatical Explanation for Sanskrit

February 2024

International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Conference, Auroville, Puducherry, India (Online presentation)

MITRA: Developing Natural Language Processing Tools for the Languages of Buddhist Literature

June 2023

Hong Kong

Developing Machine Translation for ancient Buddhist texts in canonical languages

June 2023

Seoul, Korea

Creating a Shared Semantic Vector Space for Buddhist Languages

April 2023

Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Multilingual Semantic Mining for Text Alignment and Parallel Corpus Building for Buddhist Languages

January 2023

Universität Hamburg, international symposium 'Perspectives of Digital Humanities in the Field of Buddhist Studies', Hamburg, Germany