MITRA-lexicon: Lexica of attested translations from Sanskrit into English, Tibetan and Chinese

Sebastian Nehrdich, Kengo Harimoto, Sven Sellmer, Oliver Hellwig

The standard Sanskrit lexica are monumental and indispensable, but they cite their attestations as abbreviated references to editions, without links to the digitized texts now widely available and without a translation of the passage, and they naturally do not reflect translations made after them. To address these gaps, we present MITRA-lexicon, a family of corpus-grounded lexica based on span annotations of translation equivalents with Sanskrit as the pivot: Sanskrit-English, derived from the Mitrasamgraha corpus, as well as Sanskrit-Tibetan and Sanskrit-Chinese, derived from the MITRA-parallel corpus of Buddhist literature. In total, the resource comprises 2.18 million headword entries in six directional lexica. Headwords are lemmas and compounds from silver annotations that follow the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS). Senses are ranked by frequency, and each of the 10.4 million attestations includes its sentence pair, with character offsets of the word and its equivalent. We propose a multi-step pipeline based on grammatical annotation models, fine-tuned large language models, and a teacher-student setup to produce the alignments. We evaluate the lexica against reference…