News

On November 16, 2024, So Miyagawa, Yuki Kyogoku, Yuzuki Tsukagoshi, and Kyoko Amano presented on the title “Exploring Similarity Measures and Intertextuality in Vedic Sanskrit Literature” at the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities held in Miami. The paper is published in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, 123-131. The paper is here: https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4dh-1.12.pdf 

On August 5, 2024, So Miyagawa, Yuzuki Tsukagoshi, Yuki Kyogoku, and Kyoko Amano presented on the title “Computational Analysis of Intertextuality in Vedic Texts: A Progress Report” at the DH2024 Workshop – Computational Literary Studies: How To Do Research Responsibly, SIG – Digital Literary Stylistics, held in Washington, D.C. The program is here: https://dls.hypotheses.org/1764 

On July 20, 2024, Hiroaki Natsukawa and Kyoko Amano presented on the title “Visualizing the Historic Layers of Language in Ancient Indian Texts” at the 52nd Visualization Symposium Japan 2024 held in Okinawa Industry Support Center. About the symposium click here: https://www.vsj.jp/symp2024/ 

Sebastian Nehrdich, Oliver Hellwig and Kurt Keutzer published “One Model is All You Need: ByT5-Sanskrit, a Unified Model for Sanskrit NLP Tasks” in Arxiv preprint (publication will follow in EMNLP 2024). Click here: https://www.academia.edu/125244330/One_Model_is_All_You_Need_ByT5_Sanskrit_a_Unified_Model_for_Sanskrit_NLP_Tasks?nav_from=1f0b9d15-1c69-499b-88c0-91a62de8506c 

Oliver Hellwig and Sven Sellmer published “The Placement of Objects in Vedic Sanskrit” in Medhota Sravah: Felicitation Volume in Honour of Mislav Jezic on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, 2023. Click here: https://www.academia.edu/112856244/The_Placement_of_Objects_in_Vedic_Sanskrit 

On March 19-20, 2024, a workshop titled “Exploring the Potential of Utilizing Data from Sanskrit Literature” was held at Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, co-organized with the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) “Applied research towards practical use of Devanagari OCR and utilization of text database” (Principal Investigator: Takahiro Kato; 2023-2026FY). Oliver Hellwig from the University of Zurich gave a talk as invited speaker. The details are in the “Events” page:
https://ancientindia-datascience.jp/en/events-en/

On March 15, 2024, Kyoko Amano and Hiroaki Natsukawa presented on the title “Chronological and Geographical Features of Ancient Indian Literature Explored by Data-Driven Science” at the Symposium “Historical Documents × Super Computer” in the Academic Center of Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University. https://sites.google.com/kyoto-u.ac.jp/sc2023k/ 

On March 19-20, 2024, a workshop titled “Exploring the Potential of Utilizing Data from Sanskrit Literature” will be held at Lecture Room 2, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University. The invited speaker for the event is Oliver Hellwig from the University of Zurich.
Please register using Google form here: https://forms.gle/NcDrsim8psM5xgfd9 
Download flyer: PDF 4MB

On August 8, 2023, at the 51st Visualization Symposium Japan 2023 held at Grand Park Otaru, Hiroaki Natsukawa and Kyoko Amano presented on the theme “Visual Analysis of Co-occurrence Relationships in Ancient Indian Liturgical Texts.”
Click here for the program: https://www.vsj.jp/symp2023/program.html 

During the DH2023 Workshop held at the University of Graz, in the session “SIG-DLS Seven Years on” on July 10, 2023, Yuki Kyogoku, Yuki Tsukagoshi, So Miyagawa, and Kyoko Amano presented on the topic “Comparative Analysis of Vedic Sanskrit Documents Using Doc2Vec and Transformer Models.” In the same session, with So Miyagawa as the lead author, the team also presented “Analyzing Text Similarity in Vedic Sanskrit Texts: A Bipartite Approach Using Stylometry and Text Reuse Detection.”
Click here for the program: https://dls.hypotheses.org/1340 

Yuki Tsukagoshi published “The Current State of Vedic Literature Studies from the Perspective of Digital Humanities” in Issue 142 [Part 1] of Digital Humanities Monthly. The publication is scheduled to appear later on the Digital Humanities Monthly website: https://www.dhii.jp/DHM/ 

Visualization tool for the relationships among the Vedic texts using co-occurrence of ritual mantras is available here:
http://ancient-india.natsukawa-lab.jp/ 

Kyoto University SPIRITS, Project Achievements and Future Prospects 2020-2021 is published in Kyoto University Research Information Repository KURENAI:
https://research.kyoto-u.ac.jp/spirits/s2020/ 
Kyoko Amano joined SPIRITS Roundtable Discussion “Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences” in Intro Feature.

Kyoko Amano and Hiroaki Natsukawa gave a presentation titled “Visualization of the relationship among Vedic texts and observation of the development of Yajurveda texts” at A Three Day International Seminar on Paninian Grammar & its Applications on February 14, 2023.

Oliver Hellwig, Sven Sellmer, Kyoko Amano gave a presentation titled “The Vedic corpus as a graph. An updated version of Bloomfield’s Vedic Concordance” at The 18th World Sanskrit Conference 2023 on January 12, 2023.

The previous project “Chronological and Geographical Features of Ancient Indian Literature Explored by Data-Driven Science” is published on SPIRITS website:
https://research.kyoto-u.ac.jp/spirits/jp2020/jp2020_019/ 

The collection of the slides of the Workshop “Ancient India meets Data Science” held on February11, 2022 is available here (PDF 9.9MB) 

The second and concluding Workshop of our project “Ancient India meets Data Science” was held on February 11, 2022. Videos are available in “Events” page (the 2nd Workshop) or from the links below:
Kyoko Amano https://youtu.be/6i_Hb3PeV6k 
Hiroaki Natsukawa https://youtu.be/97ap2VvcXa0 
Yuki Kyogoku https://youtu.be/8CHr9m_jDfc 
So Miyagawa https://youtu.be/wcz_6yG2z2A 
Oliver Hellwig, Sebastian Nehrdich https://youtu.be/g-J8eGTDlvs 
Concluding remark by Oliver Hellwig https://youtu.be/e4GabJOEsqo 

Prior to the coming Workshop, we released the recording of the Workshop 2021. Videos are available in “Events” page (The 1st Workshop) or from the links below:
Opening (Kyoko Amano) https://youtu.be/lqui4kWUnWo 
Hiroaki Natsukawa https://youtu.be/OqEJMSTwewg 
Kyoko Amano https://youtu.be/bxQOeuKR5sQ 
Shun Hamachi https://youtu.be/MWogMERLhJg 
Yuki Kyogoku https://youtu.be/t2HOjzkLi_I 
Oliver Hellwig https://youtu.be/FfVGR3hyO0s 
Shigeki Moro https://youtu.be/fffD2Q8IqYk 
Discussion https://youtu.be/9MjnpnLGrfo 

The second and concluding workshop of this project “Ancient India meets Data-Science” will be held on Feburary 11, 2022 (16-19 JST = 8-11 CET).
Please register using Google form here: https://forms.gle/5ZSxvieyHhArV2gF9 
Download Flyer （PDF 601KB） 

On Feburary 11, 2022 (16-19 JST = 8-11 CET), the second and concluding workshop of this project “Ancient India meets Data-Science” will be held online. It is also a Kick-off of our new project “A Study of Language Layers in Vedic Literature for the Development of a Program for Age-Estimation” (FY2021-FY2026). Program and register form will be available soon!

The Project “A Study of Language Layers in Vedic Literature for the Development of a Program for Age-Estimation”, planned as a successor to this project, has been adopted for Fostering Joint International Research (B) of KAKENHI (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research). The research period is from FY2021 to FY2026.

As new project member, So Miyagawa (Kyoto University, Graduate School of Letters
Center for Cultural Heritage Studies and Inter Humanities) is joining the project.
researchmap: https://researchmap.jp/SoMiyagawa 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2950-7193 
Website: https://somiyagawa.de/ 

On October 23, 2021, Kyoko Amano gave a presentation titled “Historical Background of the Formation of the Veda in Ancient India, as Deciphered from the Visualization of the Influence Relations among the Vedic Texts” at KUDH (Kyoto University Digitization Hub of the Humanities, Social and Cognitive Sciences) International Conference 2021.
The video is here: https://youtu.be/PP_3w4Xzyt8 

Kyoko Amano’s essay, “Ancient Indian Philology and Digital Humanities: From the Perspective of a Non-digital Researcher,” describing the process leading up to the launch of this project, has been published in The Hakubi Center Newsletter vol.19:
https://www.hakubi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/application/files/4316/3036/7313/Newsletter019.pdf 

Two papers by Oliver Hellwig dealing with Vedic Treebank (Universal Dependencies) have been published:

– Erica Biagetti, Oliver Hellwig, Sarvatore Scarlata, Elia Ackermann, Paul Widmer: “Evaluating Syntactic Annotation of Ancient Languages. Lesson from the Vedic Treebank”. In: Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia (2021), 1-32. DOI:10.1163/26670755-01010003.
https://brill.com/view/journals/ow/1/1/article-p1_3.xml 

– Oliver Hellwig, Salvatore Scarlata, Elia Ackermann, Paul Widmer: “The Treebank of Vedic Sanskrit”. Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC. 5137–5146.
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.632/ 

Kyoko Amano will give a presentation titled “Historical Background of the Formation of the Veda in Ancient India, as Deciphered from the Visualization of the Influence Relations among the Vedic Texts” at KUDH (Kyoto University Digitization Hub of the Humanities, Social and Cognitive Sciences) International Conference 2021 on October 26, 2021. Click here for tha program and register: https://www.kyoto-u-digitization.org/home 

Kyoko Amano and Hiroaki Natsukawa will give a presentation titled “Visualization of Relationship among Ancient Indian Literature” at the 49th Visualization Symposium Japan, which will be held online on September 9, 10 and 11, 2021.

Click here for more information: https://www.vsj.jp/symp2021/index.html 

Click here for the abstract of the paper: Abstract

Kyoko Amano will give a presentation titled “Is Indra a Sungot? The Multi-Layers of Thought Currents in Black Yajurveda Saṁhitās” at the 72nd Conference of the Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies, which will be held online on September 4 and 5, 2021.

Click here for more information: http://www.jaibs.jp/en/conference 

Oliver Hellwig is leading “ChronBMM — Bayesian Mixture Models für die Datierung von Textkorpora” in Digital Humanities Project by Federal Ministry of Education and Research. We share the same interest and are collaborating on buildung the database of Vedic texts. About “ChronBMM” Project: https://www.geistes-und-sozialwissenschaften-bmbf.de/de/Digital-Humanities-1710.html

A report on the workshop “Dynamism of Social Context Deciphered by a Linguistic Analysis of Ancient Literature” (Yuzuki Tsukagoshi, the University of Tokyo) has been published in Digital Humanities Monthly No. 115 [Part 2] (February 28, 2021).
http://www.dhii.jp/DHM/dhm115-2