Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia

Sergey Zinin, Yang Xu


Abstract
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 gender-specific terms. This method yields meaningful semantic representations that can be used for future studies of diachronic semantics.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.98
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
785–793
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.98
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sergey Zinin and Yang Xu. 2020. Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 785–793, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia (Zinin & Xu, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.98.pdf