New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing Through the Use of Character Structure

Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations. First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and calculate "most semantic subcharacter paths" for each character. Finally, adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18 million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of 89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, presented at CICLing 201

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licens

Sidestepping secularism: performance and imagination in Buddhist temple-scapes in contemporary China

Why, in the second decade of the 21st century, do Chinese temple-goers visit Buddhist temples even if they are religiously unaffiliated, folk religionists, or even self-proclaimed secularists? How can we develop new conceptual tools to better understand religious involvement in contemporary China? The thesis investigates the significances of temple-based activities under late socialist state secularism, which defines religion in a specific way. It suggests that temple participation allows diverse Chinese citizens to flexibly negotiate modernity, sidestep institutional constraints, and introduce ritual-religious momentums to their temple-going lives in a mainstream society. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork, the study identifies and documents three stylistic forms of temple participation that are widely accessible and require no prior religious commitments: making wish-vows, drawing efficacious lots, and providing residential temple services. It refines a method of ritual analysis for studying how these non-institutional activities affect temple-goers’ self-understandings and their worldly stances. Theoretically, the dissertation discusses the social conditions for creative actions and the relationship between religious participation and state secularism. It shows that “temples” as spatial entities can be a place for many-sided meaningful activities and an incubator for complex visions of life, outside the conventional typecast of sacred spaces based on institutional religious differences. In late socialist China, Buddhist temples exist as semi-public sites because of an inclusive Mahayana Buddhist ideal of bodhisattva practices and, paradoxically, because of a state secularist policy that endorses “Religious Activities Venues” as spatial and even residential units. Overall, the dissertation treats Chinese temple-goers as our interlocutors sharing the global modernist predicament of state secularism. We theorize a sidestepping, non-confrontational mode of religious activism, move beyond a dichotomous view of religiosity and secularity, and consider the existing creative transformative processes of a hegemonic linear-developmental view of history. Temples as places of self-transformation are historically constituted sites within the sovereign state spaces. When Chinese temple-goers reconfigure their historical selves by actively visiting temple spaces, they also open the possibility of different futures for the late socialist regime. This brings us to an anthropology of religion effectively considering the making of humanity in contemporary China in a shared modern world