Ancient Chinese texts have no sentence boundaries and punctuation. Adding modern Chinese punctuation to theses texts requires expertise, time and efforts. Automatic sentence segmentation and punctuation is considered as a basic task for Ancient Chinese processing, but there is no shared task to evaluate the performances of different systems. This paper presents the results of the first ancient Chinese sentence segmentation and punctuation bakeoff, which is held at the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) 2024. The contest uses metrics for detailed evaluations of 4 genres of unpublished texts with 11 punctuation types. Six teams submitted 32 running results. In the closed modality, the participants are only allowed to use the training data, the highest obtained F1 scores are respectively 88.47% and 75.29% in sentence segmentation and sentence punctuation. The perfermances on the unseen data is 10 percent lower than the published common data, which means there is still space for further improvement. The large language models outperform the traditional models, but LLM changes the original characters around 1-2%, due to over-generation. Thus, post-processing is needed to keep the text consistancy.

This paper presents the results of the First Ancient Chinese Word Segmentation and POS Tagging Bakeoff (EvaHan), which was held at the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) 2022, in the context of the 13th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022). We give the motivation for having an international shared contest, as well as the data and tracks. The contest is consisted of two modalities, closed and open. In the closed modality, the participants are only allowed to use the training data, obtained the highest F1 score of 96.03% and 92.05% in word segmentation and POS tagging. In the open modality, the participants can use whatever resource they have, with the highest F1 score of 96.34% and 92.56% in word segmentation and POS tagging. The scores on the blind test dataset decrease around 3 points, which shows that the out-of-vocabulary words still are the bottleneck for lexical analyzers.

Conceptual metaphors represent a cognitive mechanism to transfer knowledge structures from one onto another domain. Image-schematic conceptual metaphors (ISCMs) specialize on transferring sensorimotor experiences to abstract domains. Natural language is believed to provide evidence of such metaphors. However, approaches to verify this hypothesis largely rely on top-down methods, gathering examples by way of introspection, or on manual corpus analyses. In order to contribute towards a method that is systematic and can be replicated, we propose to bring together existing processing steps in a pipeline to detect ISCMs, exemplified for the image schema SUPPORT in the COVID-19 domain. This pipeline consist of neural metaphor detection, dependency parsing to uncover construction patterns, clustering, and BERT-based frame annotation of dependent constructions to analyse ISCMs.

Automatic extraction of spatial information from natural language can boost human-centered applications that rely on spatial dynamics. The field of cognitive linguistics has provided theories and cognitive models to address this task. Yet, existing solutions tend to focus on specific word classes, subject areas, or machine learning techniques that cannot provide cognitively plausible explanations for their decisions. We propose an automated spatial semantic analysis (ASSA) framework building on grammar and cognitive linguistic theories to identify spatial entities and relations, bringing together methods of spatial information extraction and cognitive frameworks on spatial language. The proposed rule-based and explainable approach contributes constructions and preposition schemas and outperforms previous solutions on the CLEF-2017 standard dataset.