[INDOLOGY] Introduction of MITRA Search, Deep Research, and DharmaNexus

[Sebastian Nehrdich]

Dear all,

First of all thank you for the very positive responses to our new features!
On a separate note, I forgot to mention this in the announcement and since
this came up in the GRETIL-related thread (nobody raised this in context of
our site but we do believe its a very real and serious concern): Our system
is currently, for technical reasons, not yet able to show the original
headers of the etexts and the links to the sources in the UI. We are
working hard on shipping this feature with the next update in a couple of
weeks, so we ask for a bit of patience on this end.
With many thanks,

Sebastian on behalf of the Dharmamitra team,


On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM Sebastian Nehrdich <nehrdbsd at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> We are happy to announce the launch of several new, powerful, and
> freely-available digital tools from the Dharmamitra
> <http://dharmamitra.rg> project, designed to aid in the study of Sanskrit
> and other classical Asian languages. While many of you may be familiar with
> our translation and grammar tools, we have now released a suite of services
> focused on semantic search and intertextuality exploration.
>
>
> *1. MITRA Search*MITRA Search is a semantic search engine that
> understands the meaning behind a query, not just keywords. This allows for
> nuanced discovery within large textual corpora. For Sanskritists, this
> means you can:
> Search for specific philosophical concepts (e.g., the definition of
> cetanā) and find relevant passages even if they do not use the exact
> wording or are even written in the same language.
> Find instances of a particular metaphor or analogy across different texts
> and genres.
> Use a Sanskrit passage as a query to find conceptual parallels elsewhere
> in the corpus, or in its Tibetan and Chinese translations.
> In addition to semantic search, we also provide an 'exact search' that
> uses the word segmentation system developed by Oliver Hellwig and me in
> combination with BM25 retrieval to provide a more focussed search
> experience. Since large scale search across the various Sanskrit datasets
> is a significant need in our field, we hope that this can be useful to
> people on this mailing list.
> You can learn more here:
> https://dharmamitra.github.io/dharmamitra-guides/mitra_tools/search/
>
> *2. DharmaNexus <http://dharmanexus.org>*
> As the actively maintained successor to the BuddhaNexus platform,
> DharmaNexus is a powerful tool for exploring intertextual relationships. It
> allows researchers to see how passages from Sanskrit texts are cited,
> adapted, or paralleled in other works. It also features comprehensive
> parallel data aligned on sentence level between Buddhist Sanskrit works and
> their counterparts in Tibetan and Chinese, which can be especially helpful
> for people working on material that has translations into these languages.
> Explore DharmaNexus:
> https://dharmamitra.github.io/dharmamitra-guides/dharmanexus/
>
> *3. MITRA Deep Research Translation Mode*
> While not many on this list are longing for machine translation, we now
> provide a system that combines our powerful semantic search with a broader
> analytical framework, integrating references into the actual Sanskrit and
> related literature to provide a contextually informed translation with
> references into the texts stored in DharmaNexus. This system is also able
> of locating relevant passages in other languages like Tibetan and Chinese,
> which can have positive impact on translation quality and provide further
> important references.
> Explore MITRA Deep Research:
> https://dharmamitra.github.io/dharmamitra-guides/mitra_tools/deep_research/
>
>
> *Sanskrit Data Sources*These tools are powered by a growing collection of
> digitized Sanskrit texts. The current core of our Sanskrit data is sourced
> from GRETIL, the recently releeased Muktabodha collection, and the  Digital
> Sanskrit Buddhist Canon (DSBC) as well as a number of other individual
> texts that the MITRA team has collected and digitized. We are extremely
> grateful to these institutions and proejcts to make their data available
> under permissive licenses, which enables the creation of meta resources
> like this.
> We are also continuously working to expand our corpus. There is currently
> a number of texts held back for technical reasons, but we will update the
> system very soon to patch the gaps. Going forward, Dharmamitra will aim for
> quarterly data updates. You can find more details on the Sanskrit data
> here: https://github.com/dharmamitra/dharmanexus-sanskrit/
>
> If you are interested in collaboration, of course feel free to reach out
> to us. We are happy to provide API access and share data resources
> wherever possible.
>
> All the best,
>
> The Dharmamitra Team
>


-- 
*Sebastian Nehrdich*
Incoming Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Tohoku University (starting Oct
2025)
Research Affiliate, BAIR – UC Berkeley
sebastian-nehrdich.com  <http://sebastian-nehrdich.com>
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