In this work, we develop a pipeline for historical-psychological text analysis in classical Chinese. Humans have produced texts in various languages for thousands of years; however, most of the computational literature is focused on contemporary languages and corpora. The emerging field of historical psychology relies on computational techniques to extract aspects of psychology from historical corpora using new methods developed in natural language processing (NLP). The present pipeline, called Contextualized Construct Representations (CCR), combines expert knowledge in psychometrics (i.e., psychological surveys) with text representations generated via Transformer-based language models to measure psychological constructs such as traditionalism, norm strength, and collectivism in classical Chinese corpora. Considering the scarcity of available data, we propose an indirect supervised contrastive learning approach and build the first Chinese historical psychology corpus (C-HI-PSY) to fine-tune pre-trained models. We evaluate the pipeline to demonstrate its superior performance compared with other approaches. The CCR method outperforms word-embedding-based approaches across all of our tasks and exceeds prompting with GPT-4 in most tasks. Finally, we benchmark the pipeline against objective, external data to further verify its validity.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a new fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract triplets of aspect terms, sentiments, and opinion terms from review sentences. Recently, span-level models achieve gratifying results on ASTE task by taking advantage of the predictions of all possible spans. Since all possible spans significantly increases the number of potential aspect and opinion candidates, it is crucial and challenging to efficiently extract the triplet elements among them. In this paper, we present a span-level bidirectional network which utilizes all possible spans as input and extracts triplets from spans bidirectionally. Specifically, we devise both the aspect decoder and opinion decoder to decode the span representations and extract triples from aspect-to-opinion and opinion-to-aspect directions. With these two decoders complementing with each other, the whole network can extract triplets from spans more comprehensively. Moreover, considering that mutual exclusion cannot be guaranteed between the spans, we design a similar span separation loss to facilitate the downstream task of distinguishing the correct span by expanding the KL divergence of similar spans during the training process; in the inference process, we adopt an inference strategy to remove conflicting triplets from the results base on their confidence scores. Experimental results show that our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, but achieves better performance in predicting triplets with multi-token entities and extracting triplets in sentences contain multi-triplets.