BuddhaNexus (legacy site)

Legacy notice — June 2025

This BuddhaNexus instance has not been actively developed or maintained since early 2023. It remains online in read-only mode for reference and citation purposes, but data and features will gradually become outdated.

An actively maintained successor, DharmaNexus, is currently in development and will launch later this summer at:
dharmamitra.org

Regarding the architecture of the platform, including the design of its core algorithms and the web interface, please see this publication (the same architecture was used for all languages):
Nehrdich, Sebastian (2020). "A Method for the Calculation of Parallel Passages for Buddhist Chinese Sources Based on Million-scale Nearest Neighbor Search." Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, 5(2), 132-153.

Regarding the Sanskrit-Tibetan matching algorithm and dataset, please see this publication:
Nehrdich, Sebastian (2022). "SansTib, a Sanskrit - Tibetan Parallel Corpus and Bilingual Sentence Embedding Model." Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 6728–6734.

For the Sanskrit word segmentation step, which made the Sanskrit textual match detection possible™, please see:
Hellwig, Oliver and Sebastian Nehrdich (2018). "Sanskrit Word Segmentation Using Character-level Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks." Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2754–2763.

Project history

BuddhaNexus was originally conceived by Sebastian Nehrdich, Dr. Orna Almogi, and Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk at the Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship, Universität Hamburg, and was developed between 2019 – 2023 by chief developer Sebastian Nehrdich, who designed and implemented the core algorithms, with invaluable help from: Ven. Ayya Vimala (front-end programming; Pāli-data curation), Hubert Dworczyński (front- and back-end programming), Vladimir Angirov (front- and back-end programming; match generation), and Prof. Kiyonori Nagasaki (Tibetan visual-chart design). The development was significantly supported by the Khyentse Foundation. In addition to that, a significant amount of voluntary work by the entire team made the project possible.

The codebase has since been released under the GNU GPL v3 Licence. Source repositories and data pipelines remain publicly available for anyone who wishes to deploy or extend the platform.

Source & datasets

Questions & future development

For updates on DharmaNexus or inquiries about collaboration, please check the new project site. Technical issues with this legacy instance are no longer being addressed.