A Method for the Calculation of Parallel Passages for Buddhist Chinese Sources Based on Million-scale Nearest Neighbor Search

Abstract

For research on Buddhist textual material, citations and similar passages are of major importance. This paper explores the application of continuous word representations and nearest neighbor search in order to efficiently compute a network of parallel passages for the Chinese Buddhist canon. It also discusses methods of evaluating the quality of the detected parallels and demonstrates a potential use case for the resulting data in the form of a web application for philological research.