Onto Word Segmentation of the Complete Tang Poems

We aim at segmenting words in the Complete Tang Poems (CTP). Although it is possible to do some research about CTP without doing full-scale word segmentation, we must move forward to word-level analysis of CTP for conducting advanced research topics. In November 2018 when we submitted the manuscript for DH 2019 (ADHO), we collected only 2433 poems that were segmented by trained experts, and used the segmented poems to evaluate the segmenter that considered domain knowledge of Chinese poetry. We trained pointwise mutual information (PMI) between Chinese characters based on the CTP poems (excluding the 2433 poems, which were used exclusively only for testing) and the domain knowledge. The segmenter relied on the PMI information to the recover 85.7% of words in the test poems. We could segment a poem completely correct only 17.8% of the time, however. When we presented our work at DH 2019, we have annotated more than 20000 poems. With a much larger amount of data, we were able to apply biLSTM models for this word segmentation task, and we segmented a poem completely correct above 20% of the time. In contrast, human annotators completely agreed on their annotations about 40% of the time.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables, presented at the 2019 International Conference on Digital Humanities (ADHO

Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia

Chinese dynastic histories form a large continuous linguistic space of approximately 2000 years, from the 3rd century BCE to the 18th century CE. The histories are documented in Classical (Literary) Chinese in a corpus of over 20 million characters, suitable for the computational analysis of historical lexicon and semantic change. However, there is no freely available open-source corpus of these histories, making Classical Chinese low-resource. This project introduces a new open-source corpus of twenty-four dynastic histories covered by Creative Commons license. An original list of Classical Chinese gender-specific terms was developed as a case study for analyzing the historical linguistic use of male and female terms. The study demonstrates considerable stability in the usage of these terms, with dominance of male terms. Exploration of word meanings uses keyword analysis of focus corpora created for genderspecific terms. This method yields meaningful semantic representations that can be used for future studies of diachronic semantics.Comment: 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 9 pages, 7 table