I am working as a researcher at BAIR, UC Berkeley. My interests are machine learning and natural language processing with special focus on Asian low-resource languages as well as the intersection between Buddhist Studies and NLP applications. Since 2023, I am a PhD student in computational linguistics at University of Duesseldorf, Germany, under the guidance of Oliver Hellwig and Kurt Keutzer. I have completed a bachelor’s degree in Indology and Sinology (2017) and a master’s degree in Buddhist Studies (2020) at University of Hamburg, Germany.

Projects

Since 2023, I am part of the MITRA project as CTO under the guidance of Kurt Keutzer at Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), UC Berkeley. In this project, we develop machine translation models as well as semantic search functionality for Classical Asian languages.
Since 2018, I am working on the NLP technology and database system of the BuddhaNexus platform for the research of intertextual links within Buddhist sources.

News

• Coming up Aug 10-15th 2025: I will be presenting on the panel “Machine Translation, Large Language Models, and Buddhist Studies” at the XXth Congress of the IABS, Leipzig, Aug. 10-15, 2025. The title of my talk will be “MITRA: New Research Tools for a Paradigm shift in the Philological Study of Buddhist Texts based on Machine Translation Technology”.
• 03/14/2025: Together with Xiang Wei and Marcus Bingenheimer, I will be conducting the workshop “Machine Translation for Asian Studies” at the AAS 2025 in Columbus, Ohio: click here
• 03/13/2025: I will present our work on MITRAsearch, an advanced new information retrieval system for Classical Asian Languages, at the CEAL Technology Forum in Ohio, Columbus.
• 03/09/2025: New paper accepted at NLP4DH 2025 (proceedings will follow soon): “MITRA-zh-eval: Using a Buddhist Chinese Language Evaluation Dataset to Assess Machine Translation and Evaluation Metrics”
• 12/2024: Talk at the International Symposium on Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Tokyo: “MITRA Search: Exploring Buddhist Literature Preserved in Classical Asian Languages with Multilingual Approximate Search” on December 22nd, 2024, at Ito International Research Center. The symposium commemorates 100 Years of the Taishō Tripiṭaka and 30 Years of SAT.
• 11/2024: Upcoming public online talk: I will present the Dharmamitra project as part of the “Manuscriptology and digital humanities online lecture series” at Heidelberg University on Friday, Nov 22th, 9am CET. Click here for the Zoom link and further details.
• 9/2024: New publication out: Nehrdich, S., Hellwig, O., & Keutzer, K. (2024). “One Model is All You Need: ByT5-Sanskrit, a Unified Model for Sanskrit NLP Tasks.” In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings).
• 8/2024: New publication out: Meelen, Marieke, Sebastian Nehrdich and Kurt Keutzer, “Breakthroughs in Tibetan NLP & Digital Humanities”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 72, Juillet 2024, pp. 5-25.
• 11/2023: New publication out: Nehrdich, Sebastian, Marcus Bingenheimer, Justin Brody and Kurt Keutzer. “MITRA-zh: An efficient, open machine translation solution for Buddhist Chinese.” NLP4DH (2023).