Crosslinguistic Semantic Textual Similarity of Buddhist Chinese and Classical Tibetan

In this paper we present the first -ever procedure for identifying highly similar sequences of text in Chinese and Tibetan translations of Buddhist s & umacr;tra literature. We initially propose this procedure as an aid to scholars engaged in the philological study of Buddhist documents. We create a cross -lingual embedding space by taking the cosine similarity of average sequence vectors in order to produce unsupervised similar cross -linguistic parallel alignments at word, sentence, and even paragraph level. Initial results show that our method lays a solid foundation for the future development of a fully-fledged Information Retrieval tool for these (and potentially other) low -resource historical languages.