Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 785–793 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 785 Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia Sergey Zinin, Yang Xu University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Toronto Warring States Workshop, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, Department of Computer Science, Toronto, Canada szinin@research.umass.edu, yangxu@cs.toronto.edu Abstract Chinese dynastic histories form a large continuous linguistic space of approximately 2000 years, from the 3rd century BCE to the 18th century CE. The histories are documented in Classical (Literary) Chinese in a corpus of over 20 million characters, suitable for the computational analysis of historical lexicon and semantic change. However, there is no freely available open-source corpus of these histories, making Classical Chinese low-resource. This project introduces a new open-source corpus of twenty-four dynastic histories covered by Creative Commons license. An original list of Classical Chinese gender-specific terms was developed as a case study for analyzing the historical linguistic use of male and female terms. The study demonstrates considerable stability in the usage of these terms, with dominance of male terms. Exploration of word meanings uses keyword analysis of focus corpora created for gender- specific terms. This method yields meaningful semantic representations that can be used for future studies of diachronic semantics. Keywords: Classical Chinese, dynastic histories, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, semantics, gender, keyword analysis 1. Introduction The renowned sinologist Homer L. Dubs noted, “the world's greatest repository of historical information is to be found in the twenty-five officially approved Chinese standard histories” (Dubs, 1946). This happened due to centrality of historiography toward the traditional Chinese culture. One result of this fact is the availability of a large resource for corpus linguistic studies of Classical Chinese. Unlike many of the early Chinese literature, the Twenty- Four Dynastic Histories 1 have solid textological provenance; they were written under rigorous stylistic requirements in consistent Classical Chinese over a period of more than 2000 years (from the 3rd century BCE to the 18th century CE), making them one of the longest diachronic linguistic repositories. While some parts of these histories (e.g., chronicles benji) are considered very formal, the main body of histories consists of “biographies” (liezhuan). These biographical narratives present the life of Chinese society in different periods. Although philosophical treatises of the Warring States and Early Imperial periods have invited research among computational linguists, few can compare with the dynastic histories as a linguistic resource. The size of this resource2 and its diachronic scope make it ideal for corpus linguistic studies of Classical Chinese. The significance of the Twenty-Four Histories as the major resource for computational linguistics has always been understood in the Chinese academy. The earliest and one of the most authoritative online corpora of Classical Chinese, the Academia Sinica’s Scripta Sinica (see Scripta Sinica), was built on “Full Text Chinese documents” database project, which itself started as 1 In the current project, the term Twenty-Four Histories is used, as it is more traditional. If the …

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