Glimpses of Ancient China from Classical Chinese Poems
John Lee, Tak‐sum Wong · International Conference on Computational Linguistics · 2012
While our knowledge about ancient civilizations comes mostly from studies in archaeology and history books, much can also be learned or confirmed from literary texts . Using natural language processing techniques, we present aspects of ancient China as revealed by statistical textual analysis on the Complete Tang Poems, a 2.6-million-character corpus of all surviving poems from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618—907). Using an automatically created treebank of this corpus , we outline the semantic profiles of various poets, and discuss the role of s easons, geography, history, architecture, and colours , as observed through word selection and dependencies.