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.
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!
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
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...
Thank you so much & yes I will be at the IABS too — looking forward to meeting up there! It would be great indeed.
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 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…
The 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.
:)
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/...
… 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.
I 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…
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:
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Fortunately, 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.
Still 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.
I 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.
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)
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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...
Fighting over syllables will certainly continue in some form or the other, but I wouldn't bet my living on that.
For 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/
Philology 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/