A verb dictionary containing over 1,700 root verb forms and phrasal verb subentries and incorpora... more A verb dictionary containing over 1,700 root verb forms and phrasal verb subentries and incorporating a wide range of information not previously available in dictionary form. The individual entries are in Tibetan script and contain English meanings, Sanskrit equivalents, complete sentences drawn from the corpus of Tibetan classical literature, and related sentence structure information.
In 1937, Theos Casimir Bernard (1908–1947), the self-proclaimed “White Lama,” became the third Am... more In 1937, Theos Casimir Bernard (1908–1947), the self-proclaimed “White Lama,” became the third American in history to reach Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. During his stay, he amassed the largest collection of Tibetan texts, art, and artifacts in the Western hemisphere at that time. He also documented, in both still photography and 16mm film, the age-old civilization of Tibet on the eve of its destruction by Chinese Communists.
Based on thousands of primary sources and rare archival materials, Theos Bernard, the White Lama recounts the real story behind the purported adventures of this iconic figure and his role in the growth of America’s religious counterculture. Over the course of his brief life, Bernard met, associated, and corresponded with the major social, political, and cultural leaders of his day, from the Regent and high politicians of Tibet to saints, scholars, and diplomats of British India, from Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Gandhi and Nehru. Although hailed as a brilliant pioneer by the media, Bernard also had his flaws. He was an entrepreneur propelled by grandiose schemes, a handsome man who shamelessly used his looks to bounce from rich wife to rich wife in support of his activities, and a master manipulator who concocted his own interpretation of Eastern wisdom to suit his ends. Bernard had a bright future before him, but disappeared in India during the communal violence of the 1947 Partition, never to be seen again.
Through diaries, interviews, and previously unstudied documents, Paul G. Hackett shares Bernard’s compelling life story, along with his efforts to awaken America’s religious counterculture to the unfolding events in India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. Hackett concludes with a detailed geographical and cultural trace of Bernard’s Indian and Tibetan journeys, which shed rare light on the explorer’s mysterious disappearance.
An introduction and selected translated articles from "The Mirror" (me long) newspaper on science... more An introduction and selected translated articles from "The Mirror" (me long) newspaper on science, politics, and political propaganda in Tibet during the mid-20th century. Includes translation of articles on the Solar Eclipse of 1933, a steganographic poem by Geshe Sherap Gyatso (shes rab rgya mtsho, 1884–1968), and an article on Bodhgaya under British management.
Th is paper presents what we believe to be the fi rst reported work on Tibetan machine translatio... more Th is paper presents what we believe to be the fi rst reported work on Tibetan machine translation (MT). Of the three conceptually distinct components of a MT system — analysis, transfer, and generation — the fi rst phase, consisting of POS tagging has been successfully completed. Th e combination POS tagger / word-segmenter was manually constructed as a rule-based multi-tagger relying on the Wilson formulation of Tibetan grammar. Partial parsing was also performed in combination with POS-tag sequence disambiguation. Th e component was evaluated at the task of document indexing for Information Retrieval (IR). Preliminary analysis indicated slightly better (though statistically comparable) performance to n-gram based approaches at a known-item IR task. Although segmentation is application specifi c, error analysis placed segmentation accuracy at 99%; the accuracy of the POS tagger is also estimated at 99% based on IR error analysis and random sampling.
The Reason Sixty is the most concise philosophical work by the second-century Indian Buddhist phi... more The Reason Sixty is the most concise philosophical work by the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. It is one of that master's works most often cited by Centrist (Madhyamaka) commentators, and it is included in the Sixfold Canon of Reason (rigs tshogs drug) which forms the textual basis for Centrist studies in the Tibetan philosophical curriculum. Standing midway between his other masterpieces on philosophy and religion, in the Reason Sixty Nagarjuna describes the central thrust of his therapeutic philosophy of language - the elimination of cognitive bias and affective resistances to the gradual cultivation of nondualistic wisdom and compassion. The seventh-century Centrist master Chandrakirti, concerned with applying his language therapeutic method to define the social epistemology of Centrism, likewise links the critical hermeneutic-pedagogy and the practical therapeutic-anthropology of his other works in his acclaimed Reason Sixty Commentary. Includes detaile...
This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a se... more This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a segment of the corpus of Guhyasam?ja literature and, in doing so, addresses both emic and etic approaches to the hermeneutics of tantric texts. On the most basic level, we discuss the mechanisms for interpreting statements within the root tantra internal to the exegetical tantric literature itself, as exemplified by Candrak?rti’s ‘Brightening Lamp’ (Prad?poddyotana) commentary and the extensive sub-commentary by Bhavyak?rti. On another level, however, these same exegetical moves can be viewed in terms of the ideas ‘re-use’ and reformulation of the root text, and how they shape the understanding of the role and function of tantric commentary.
Buddhist Studies Review 33(1-2)[2016]: 163-180. This paper presents a case study in the exegesis ... more Buddhist Studies Review 33(1-2)[2016]: 163-180. This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a segment of the corpus of Guhyasamāja literature and, in doing so, addresses both emic and etic approaches to the hermeneutics of tantric texts. On the most basic level, we discuss the mechanisms for interpreting statements within the root tantra internal to the exegetical tantric literature itself, as exemplified by Candrakīrti's 'Brightening Lamp' (Pradīpoddyotana) commentary and the extensive sub-commentary by Bhavyakīrti. On another level, however, these same exegetical moves can be viewed in terms of the ideas 're-use' and reformulation of the root text, and how they shape the understanding of the role and function of tantric commentary.
Contribution to the festschrift: _In Vimalakīrti's House: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A.F. T... more Contribution to the festschrift: _In Vimalakīrti's House: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A.F. Thurman on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday_ NY: AIBS (2015), pp. 342-373 [plus reconstructed bibliography]
Contribution to the festschrift: _Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibe... more Contribution to the festschrift: _Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibet in Honor of Jeffrey Hopkins_ Ithaca: Snow Lion Publication (2001), pp. 291-326 [now out-of-print]
Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide the retriev... more Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide the retrieval of documents that might be written in another. Acquisition and representation of translation knowledge plays a central role in this process. This paper explores the utility of two sources of manually encoded translation knowledge, bilingual dictionaries and translation lexicons, for cross-language retrieval. We have implemented six query translation techniques that use bilingual dictionaries, one based on lexicalsemantic analysis, and one based on direct use of the translation output from an existing machine translation system; these are compared with a document translation technique that uses output from the same existing translation system. Average precision measures on portions of the TREC collection suggest that arbitrarily selecting a single translation from a bilingual dictionary is typically no less effective than using every translation in the dictionary, that query translation using an existing machine translation system can achieve somewhat better e ectiveness than simple dictionary-based techniques, and that performing document translation rather than query translation may result in further improvements in retrieval e ectiveness under some conditions.
The University o f Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language ... more The University o f Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language retrieval, and spoken document retrieval. The principal focus of the work was evaluation of a crosslanguage text retrieval technique based on fully automatic machine translation. The results show that approaches based on document translation can be approximately as e ective as approaches based on query translation, but that additional work will be needed to develop a solid basis for choosing between the two in speci c applications. Ad hoc and spoken document retrieval results are also presented.
A verb dictionary containing over 1,700 root verb forms and phrasal verb subentries and incorpora... more A verb dictionary containing over 1,700 root verb forms and phrasal verb subentries and incorporating a wide range of information not previously available in dictionary form. The individual entries are in Tibetan script and contain English meanings, Sanskrit equivalents, complete sentences drawn from the corpus of Tibetan classical literature, and related sentence structure information.
In 1937, Theos Casimir Bernard (1908–1947), the self-proclaimed “White Lama,” became the third Am... more In 1937, Theos Casimir Bernard (1908–1947), the self-proclaimed “White Lama,” became the third American in history to reach Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. During his stay, he amassed the largest collection of Tibetan texts, art, and artifacts in the Western hemisphere at that time. He also documented, in both still photography and 16mm film, the age-old civilization of Tibet on the eve of its destruction by Chinese Communists.
Based on thousands of primary sources and rare archival materials, Theos Bernard, the White Lama recounts the real story behind the purported adventures of this iconic figure and his role in the growth of America’s religious counterculture. Over the course of his brief life, Bernard met, associated, and corresponded with the major social, political, and cultural leaders of his day, from the Regent and high politicians of Tibet to saints, scholars, and diplomats of British India, from Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Gandhi and Nehru. Although hailed as a brilliant pioneer by the media, Bernard also had his flaws. He was an entrepreneur propelled by grandiose schemes, a handsome man who shamelessly used his looks to bounce from rich wife to rich wife in support of his activities, and a master manipulator who concocted his own interpretation of Eastern wisdom to suit his ends. Bernard had a bright future before him, but disappeared in India during the communal violence of the 1947 Partition, never to be seen again.
Through diaries, interviews, and previously unstudied documents, Paul G. Hackett shares Bernard’s compelling life story, along with his efforts to awaken America’s religious counterculture to the unfolding events in India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. Hackett concludes with a detailed geographical and cultural trace of Bernard’s Indian and Tibetan journeys, which shed rare light on the explorer’s mysterious disappearance.
An introduction and selected translated articles from "The Mirror" (me long) newspaper on science... more An introduction and selected translated articles from "The Mirror" (me long) newspaper on science, politics, and political propaganda in Tibet during the mid-20th century. Includes translation of articles on the Solar Eclipse of 1933, a steganographic poem by Geshe Sherap Gyatso (shes rab rgya mtsho, 1884–1968), and an article on Bodhgaya under British management.
Th is paper presents what we believe to be the fi rst reported work on Tibetan machine translatio... more Th is paper presents what we believe to be the fi rst reported work on Tibetan machine translation (MT). Of the three conceptually distinct components of a MT system — analysis, transfer, and generation — the fi rst phase, consisting of POS tagging has been successfully completed. Th e combination POS tagger / word-segmenter was manually constructed as a rule-based multi-tagger relying on the Wilson formulation of Tibetan grammar. Partial parsing was also performed in combination with POS-tag sequence disambiguation. Th e component was evaluated at the task of document indexing for Information Retrieval (IR). Preliminary analysis indicated slightly better (though statistically comparable) performance to n-gram based approaches at a known-item IR task. Although segmentation is application specifi c, error analysis placed segmentation accuracy at 99%; the accuracy of the POS tagger is also estimated at 99% based on IR error analysis and random sampling.
The Reason Sixty is the most concise philosophical work by the second-century Indian Buddhist phi... more The Reason Sixty is the most concise philosophical work by the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. It is one of that master's works most often cited by Centrist (Madhyamaka) commentators, and it is included in the Sixfold Canon of Reason (rigs tshogs drug) which forms the textual basis for Centrist studies in the Tibetan philosophical curriculum. Standing midway between his other masterpieces on philosophy and religion, in the Reason Sixty Nagarjuna describes the central thrust of his therapeutic philosophy of language - the elimination of cognitive bias and affective resistances to the gradual cultivation of nondualistic wisdom and compassion. The seventh-century Centrist master Chandrakirti, concerned with applying his language therapeutic method to define the social epistemology of Centrism, likewise links the critical hermeneutic-pedagogy and the practical therapeutic-anthropology of his other works in his acclaimed Reason Sixty Commentary. Includes detaile...
This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a se... more This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a segment of the corpus of Guhyasam?ja literature and, in doing so, addresses both emic and etic approaches to the hermeneutics of tantric texts. On the most basic level, we discuss the mechanisms for interpreting statements within the root tantra internal to the exegetical tantric literature itself, as exemplified by Candrak?rti’s ‘Brightening Lamp’ (Prad?poddyotana) commentary and the extensive sub-commentary by Bhavyak?rti. On another level, however, these same exegetical moves can be viewed in terms of the ideas ‘re-use’ and reformulation of the root text, and how they shape the understanding of the role and function of tantric commentary.
Buddhist Studies Review 33(1-2)[2016]: 163-180. This paper presents a case study in the exegesis ... more Buddhist Studies Review 33(1-2)[2016]: 163-180. This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a segment of the corpus of Guhyasamāja literature and, in doing so, addresses both emic and etic approaches to the hermeneutics of tantric texts. On the most basic level, we discuss the mechanisms for interpreting statements within the root tantra internal to the exegetical tantric literature itself, as exemplified by Candrakīrti's 'Brightening Lamp' (Pradīpoddyotana) commentary and the extensive sub-commentary by Bhavyakīrti. On another level, however, these same exegetical moves can be viewed in terms of the ideas 're-use' and reformulation of the root text, and how they shape the understanding of the role and function of tantric commentary.
Contribution to the festschrift: _In Vimalakīrti's House: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A.F. T... more Contribution to the festschrift: _In Vimalakīrti's House: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A.F. Thurman on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday_ NY: AIBS (2015), pp. 342-373 [plus reconstructed bibliography]
Contribution to the festschrift: _Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibe... more Contribution to the festschrift: _Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibet in Honor of Jeffrey Hopkins_ Ithaca: Snow Lion Publication (2001), pp. 291-326 [now out-of-print]
Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide the retriev... more Cross-language retrieval systems seek to use queries in one natural language to guide the retrieval of documents that might be written in another. Acquisition and representation of translation knowledge plays a central role in this process. This paper explores the utility of two sources of manually encoded translation knowledge, bilingual dictionaries and translation lexicons, for cross-language retrieval. We have implemented six query translation techniques that use bilingual dictionaries, one based on lexicalsemantic analysis, and one based on direct use of the translation output from an existing machine translation system; these are compared with a document translation technique that uses output from the same existing translation system. Average precision measures on portions of the TREC collection suggest that arbitrarily selecting a single translation from a bilingual dictionary is typically no less effective than using every translation in the dictionary, that query translation using an existing machine translation system can achieve somewhat better e ectiveness than simple dictionary-based techniques, and that performing document translation rather than query translation may result in further improvements in retrieval e ectiveness under some conditions.
The University o f Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language ... more The University o f Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language retrieval, and spoken document retrieval. The principal focus of the work was evaluation of a crosslanguage text retrieval technique based on fully automatic machine translation. The results show that approaches based on document translation can be approximately as e ective as approaches based on query translation, but that additional work will be needed to develop a solid basis for choosing between the two in speci c applications. Ad hoc and spoken document retrieval results are also presented.
This thesis reports the results of a pilot study comparing two different techniques for indexing ... more This thesis reports the results of a pilot study comparing two different techniques for indexing Tibetan electronic documents in support of fulfilling certain information retrieval (IR) needs of users of a Tibetan electronic document collection: word-based indexing (relying on segmentation), and syllable n-gram based indexing.
Appendix to: Paul G. Hackett. Barbarian Lands: Theos Bernard, Tibet, and the American Religious L... more Appendix to: Paul G. Hackett. Barbarian Lands: Theos Bernard, Tibet, and the American Religious Life. Ph.D. dissertation. Columbia University (2008). An overview of American visitors to Tibet with bibliographic references, updated with errata and addenda (2017).
Building on previous research, this paper presents an overview of the bibliographic and lexical r... more Building on previous research, this paper presents an overview of the bibliographic and lexical resources currently being deployed online for students and scholars interested in translating classical Tibetan literature, and in particular, the Kangyur and Tengyur, and related literature. The database being demonstrated has been designed as a comprehensive central index for a wide-range of resources—scanned page images and e-text of both primary and secondary texts. These resources have been linked both between themselves and to additional external resources, together with bibliographic references and hypertext links. This paper presents four new features of this database that highlight the depth of annotation and linking available on the site, and well as different forms of research enabled by it: expanded bibliographic coverage, union catalogue numbers, full-text searching, and machine-assisted translation services.
This paper presents an analysis of the Unicode encoding scheme for Tibetan from the standpoint of... more This paper presents an analysis of the Unicode encoding scheme for Tibetan from the standpoint of morpheme entropy. We can speak of two levels of entropy in Tibetan: syllable entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of syllables), and morpheme entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of characters or morphemes), the latter being a measure of the redundancy of the language. Syllable entropy is a purely statistical calculation that is a function of the domain of the literature sampled, while morpheme entropy, we show, is relatively domain independent given a statistically significant sample. Morpheme entropy can be calculated statistically, though a theoretical upper bound can also be postulated based on language dependent morphology rules. This paper presents both theoretical and statistical estimates of the morpheme entropy for Tibetan, and explores the Tibetan Unicode encoding scheme in relation to data compression, and other issues analyzed in light of entropy-based language modeling.
… of the fifth international workshop on on …, Jan 1, 2000
Tibetan retrieval based on automatically segmented words is compared with the use of overlapping ... more Tibetan retrieval based on automatically segmented words is compared with the use of overlapping syllable n-grams using a known-item retrieval evaluation. The optimal span of fixed-length n-grams is found to be 2 syllables, and indexing words is found to be as effective as indexing syllable bigrams.
To properly implement a simple Tibetan Information Retrieval (IR) system segmentation of one form... more To properly implement a simple Tibetan Information Retrieval (IR) system segmentation of one form or another (n-gram, POS tagging, dictionary substring matching, etc.) must be performed (see Hackett (2000b)). To take Tibetan indexing to a more sophisticated level however, some form of topic detection must be employed. This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the application to Tibetan of one technique for topic boundary detection: Lexical Cohesion. The resources developed and deployed, the theoretical model used, and its potential applications are discussed.
This paper presents what we believe to be the first reported work on Tibetan machine translation ... more This paper presents what we believe to be the first reported work on Tibetan machine translation (MT). Of the three conceptually distinct components of a MT system — analysis, transfer, and generation — the first phase, consisting of POS tagging has been successfully completed. The combination POS-tagger / word-segmenter was manually constructed as a rule-based multi-tagger relying on the Wilson formulation of Tibetan grammar. Partial parsing was also performed in combination with POS-tag sequence disambiguation. The component was evaluated at the task of document indexing for Information Retrieval (IR). Preliminary analysis indicated slightly better (though statistically comparable) performance to n-gram based approaches at a known-item IR task. Although segmentation is application specific, error analysis placed segmentation accuracy at 99%; the accuracy of the POS tagger is also estimated at 99% based on IR error analysis and random sampling.
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Books by Paul G Hackett
Based on thousands of primary sources and rare archival materials, Theos Bernard, the White Lama recounts the real story behind the purported adventures of this iconic figure and his role in the growth of America’s religious counterculture. Over the course of his brief life, Bernard met, associated, and corresponded with the major social, political, and cultural leaders of his day, from the Regent and high politicians of Tibet to saints, scholars, and diplomats of British India, from Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Gandhi and Nehru. Although hailed as a brilliant pioneer by the media, Bernard also had his flaws. He was an entrepreneur propelled by grandiose schemes, a handsome man who shamelessly used his looks to bounce from rich wife to rich wife in support of his activities, and a master manipulator who concocted his own interpretation of Eastern wisdom to suit his ends. Bernard had a bright future before him, but disappeared in India during the communal violence of the 1947 Partition, never to be seen again.
Through diaries, interviews, and previously unstudied documents, Paul G. Hackett shares Bernard’s compelling life story, along with his efforts to awaken America’s religious counterculture to the unfolding events in India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. Hackett concludes with a detailed geographical and cultural trace of Bernard’s Indian and Tibetan journeys, which shed rare light on the explorer’s mysterious disappearance.
Papers by Paul G Hackett
Based on thousands of primary sources and rare archival materials, Theos Bernard, the White Lama recounts the real story behind the purported adventures of this iconic figure and his role in the growth of America’s religious counterculture. Over the course of his brief life, Bernard met, associated, and corresponded with the major social, political, and cultural leaders of his day, from the Regent and high politicians of Tibet to saints, scholars, and diplomats of British India, from Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Gandhi and Nehru. Although hailed as a brilliant pioneer by the media, Bernard also had his flaws. He was an entrepreneur propelled by grandiose schemes, a handsome man who shamelessly used his looks to bounce from rich wife to rich wife in support of his activities, and a master manipulator who concocted his own interpretation of Eastern wisdom to suit his ends. Bernard had a bright future before him, but disappeared in India during the communal violence of the 1947 Partition, never to be seen again.
Through diaries, interviews, and previously unstudied documents, Paul G. Hackett shares Bernard’s compelling life story, along with his efforts to awaken America’s religious counterculture to the unfolding events in India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. Hackett concludes with a detailed geographical and cultural trace of Bernard’s Indian and Tibetan journeys, which shed rare light on the explorer’s mysterious disappearance.