WikiHan: A New Comparative Dataset for Chinese Languages

Kalvin Chang, Chenxuan Cui, Youngmin Kim, David R. Mortensen


Abstract
Most comparative datasets of Chinese varieties are not digital; however, Wiktionary includes a wealth of transcriptions of words from these varieties. The usefulness of these data is limited by the fact that they use a wide range of variety-specific romanizations, making data difficult to compare. The current work collects this data into a single constituent (IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet) and structured form (TSV) for use in comparative linguistics and Chinese NLP. At the time of writing, the dataset contains 67,943 entries across 8 varieties and Middle Chinese. The dataset is validated on a protoform reconstruction task using an encoder-decoder cross-attention architecture (Meloni et al 2021), achieving an accuracy of 54.11%, a PER (phoneme error rate) of 17.69%, and a FER (feature error rate) of 6.60%.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.314
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3563–3569
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.314
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kalvin Chang, Chenxuan Cui, Youngmin Kim, and David R. Mortensen. 2022. WikiHan: A New Comparative Dataset for Chinese Languages. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3563–3569, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WikiHan: A New Comparative Dataset for Chinese Languages (Chang et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.314.pdf
Code
 cmu-llab/wikihan +  additional community code