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

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.