Expertise

Buddhist Studies; Chinese Buddhism; Song-Yuan Buddhist Literature; Monastic Poetry; Travel Writing; Buddhist Biography; Classical Chinese; Digital Humanities; Natural Language Processing; Computational Text Analysis; Bert-Based Language Models; Machine Translation of Buddhist Texts; GIS; Social Network Analysis; Computational Codicology; Manuscript Studies; Lanten Religious Manuscripts.

Biography 

Xiang Wei is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Temple University. Her research focuses on Chinese Buddhism, especially Buddhist literature of the Song and Yuan dynasties, with particular attention to monastic poetry, travel writing, and biographical texts. She examines how Buddhist monks articulated religious identity, engaged with political authority, and imagined cultural centers and peripheral spaces through literary production.

Her work combines philology, close reading, and intellectual history with digital humanities methods. She applies natural language processing, text classification, semantic modeling, emotion analysis, and BERT-based language models to Classical Chinese and Buddhist corpora. Her broader research interest lies in using computational methods to support historically grounded interpretation of Buddhist texts while preserving the central role of humanistic judgment. She has also worked on computational codicology and Lanten religious manuscripts through image-based analysis of material features and manuscript anomalies.

Selected Publications

• Xiang Wei. “The Use of Large Language Models for Translating Buddhist Texts from Classical Chinese to Modern English: An Analysis and Evaluation with ChatGPT-4, ERNIE Bot 4, and Gemini Advanced.” Religions 15, no. 12 (2024): 1559. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121559
• Sebastian Nehrdich, Avery Chen, Marcus Bingenheimer, Lu Huang, Rouying Tang, Xiang Wei, Leijie Zhu, and Kurt Keutzer. “MITRA-zh-eval: Using a Buddhist Chinese Language Evaluation Dataset to Assess Machine Translation and Evaluation Metrics.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, 129–137. Albuquerque: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025.
• Xiang Wei and Rouying Tang, trans. “On the Use of Historical Social Network Analysis in the Study of Chinese Buddhism: The Case of Dao’an, Huiyuan, and Kumārajīva.” Buddhist Studies, 2023.
• Xiang Wei. Computational Codicology via Thermal Diffusion: Visualizing Material Anomalies in Lanten Religious Manuscripts. Digital humanities research project, completed December 2025. https://github.com/xiangbuddha/Vheat-codicology
• Xiang Wei. Buddhafate: Domain-Specific BERT Model for Classical Chinese Poetry and Emotion Analysis. https://huggingface.co/Buddhafate

Courses Taught

• REL 2006: Death and Dying
• REL 1001: Religion and Society
• REL 0811: Asian Behavior and Thought
• REL 0863: Religion in the World