Classifying Chinese Texts in Two Steps

Author(s):  
Xinghua Fan ◽  
Maosong Sun ◽  
Key-sun Choi ◽  
Qin Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Peter Francis Kornicki

This chapter first examines the oral dimension of the dissemination of Sinitic texts in East Asia. Although a few individuals who had spent many years in China or who were of Chinese origin were able to read Chinese texts in some form of Chinese pronunciation, this was not the case even for most members of the elites, for few spent much time in China. In most societies, conventional pronunciations developed for Chinese characters and these conformed to local phonologies. The first stage of vernacularization, therefore, was in the oral domain. Conversely, however, since there was no common spoken language like Latin, opportunities for intellectual exchange with people from other societies were limited. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, examines the limited extent to which interpreters were trained and other people learned spoken foreign languages. The chapter concludes with an examination of brush conversation, a written substitute for oral conversation.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Igor A. Bessmertny ◽  
Xiaoxi Huang ◽  
Aleksei V. Platonov ◽  
Chuqiao Yu ◽  
Julia A. Koroleva

Search engines are able to find documents containing patterns from a query. This approach can be used for alphabetic languages such as English. However, Chinese is highly dependent on context. The significant problem of Chinese text processing is the missing blanks between words, so it is necessary to segment the text to words before any other action. Algorithms for Chinese text segmentation should consider context; that is, the word segmentation process depends on other ideograms. As the existing segmentation algorithms are imperfect, we have considered an approach to build the context from all possible n-grams surrounding the query words. This paper proposes a quantum-inspired approach to rank Chinese text documents by their relevancy to the query. Particularly, this approach uses Bell’s test, which measures the quantum entanglement of two words within the context. The contexts of words are built using the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) algorithm. Experiments fulfilled in three domains demonstrated that the proposed approach provides acceptable results.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
John E. Herman

What would Chinese history look like if we were to examine it from the perspective of the peoples living along China's periphery? How might a non-Chinese perspective challenge the dominant themes in Chinese historiography, themes which represent Chinese history as a linear narrative arising from the Central Plain and its original inhabitants, the Han Chinese? If, for example, we rely solely on Chinese sources to tell us about Chinese-Jurchen/Manchu relations during the first half of the seventeenth century, we will have privileged Chinese sources, affirmed the authority of the Chinese perspective, and suppressed voices that might offer an alternative perspective. Only an aggressive deconstruction of such “authoritative” Chinese texts can expose biases and logical inconsistencies, unpack cultural tensions that demand more rigorous scrutiny, and tease out into the open silenced voices from spaces buried deep in the text. Those historians who engage in such a methodological approach, however, run the risk of being accused of applying fanciful postmodernist conjecture or presentist interpretations to the past. This is why the recent (since the 1980s) addition of Manchu language sources to our examination of Qing history (1636–1912) has had such a seismic impact on the field.


1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony McEnery ◽  
Richard Xiao

This paper uses an English-Chinese parallel corpus, an L1 Chinese comparable corpus, and an L1 Chinese reference corpus to examine how aspectual meanings in English are translated into Chinese and explore the effects of domains, text types and translation on aspect marking. We will show that while English and Chinese both mark aspect grammatically, the aspect system in the two languages differs considerably. Even though Chinese, as an aspect language, is rich in aspect markers, covert marking (LVM) is a frequent and important strategy in Chinese discourse. The distribution of aspect markers varies significantly across domain and text type. The study also sheds new light on the translation effect by contrasting aspect marking in translated Chinese texts and L1 Chinese texts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Qu Jingyi

As one of the Early Four Historiographies, Fan Ye’s Book of the Later Han preserves significant works of both historical and literary value. This is something increasingly significant in response to the dynamic growth in popularity of classical Chinese texts among Western sinologists. Through reading the English translation of the “Biography of Huan Tan and Feng Yan” from the Book of the Later Han, the following<br />three issues are arguably noteworthy for the translator’s consideration. Firstly, the English translation may involve an<br />interim step of intralingual translation from classical Chinese to modern Chinese, before a subsequent interlingual translation from modern Chinese to English. While this facilitates the process of translation,<br />the vernacular translation also involves further risks in misinterpretation. Secondly, translation of such historiographical work which consists of literary works by various writers with numerous historical references,<br />not only requires the translator to conduct additional analysis and write explanatory notes, it also makes the English output inaccessible to most readers. Thirdly,<br />the highly interdisciplinary knowledge in relevant historiography not only demands a high quality of competency in translators, but also arguably acts as a catalyst for further academic research in the process of close reading and research. This paper intends to analyse the above three issues through a case study on the “Biography of Huan Tan and Feng Yan”, thereby demonstrating how the translation of Chinese classics is an<br />arduous yet meaningful challenge.


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