Xiaotong Xu


2024

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Vector Poetics: Parallel Couplet Detection in Classical Chinese Poetry
Maciej Kurzynski | Xiaotong Xu | Yu Feng
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

This paper explores computational approaches for detecting parallelism in classical Chinese poetry, a rhetorical device where two verses mirror each other in syntax, meaning, tone, and rhythm. We experiment with five classification methods: (1) verb position matching, (2) integrated semantic, syntactic, and word-segmentation analysis, (3) difference-based character embeddings, (4) structured examples (inner/outer couplets), and (5) GPT-guided classification. We use a manually annotated dataset, containing 6,125 pentasyllabic couplets, to evaluate performance. The results indicate that parallelism detection poses a significant challenge even for powerful LLMs such as GPT-4o, with the highest F1 score below 0.72. Nevertheless, each method contributes valuable insights into the art of parallelism in Chinese poetry, suggesting a new understanding of parallelism as a verbal expression of principal components in a culturally defined vector space.