Chinese Personal Names Research Articles

Exploring the Capabilities of ChatGPT in Ancient Chinese Translation and Person Name Recognition

Abstract This study examines the potential of ChatGPT, notable for its skill in standard modern languages, in the context of ancient Chinese. We focus on two fundamental tasks: translating ancient Chinese into modern Chinese and identifying ancient Chinese names. We conduct experiments on Shi Shuo Xin Yu, which is a collection of anecdotes, short conversations, and pithy observations on personalities who lived in China between about 150 and 420 A.D. We also include other methods, like Baidu Yiyan (ERNIE-Bot) for ancient-to-modern translation, and SIKU-RoBERTa for ancient Chinese name recognition. The results reveal that ChatGPT’s performance in ancient Chinese remains in need of enhancement, but it excels in the task of ancient-to-modern translation with the provision of a few context sentences. For the ancient Chinese name recognition, ChatGPT can outperform SIKU-RoBERTa model in terms of precision, but suffers from low recall.

The structure of Chinese personal names

The structure of Chinese personal names

Earliest European Accounts of Chinese Secret Societies in the Beginning of the 19th Century

The paper examines the earliest information by the Europeans concerning activities of the secret societies – traditional public organizations that have played a significant role in history of China and continues to be a phenomenon of public life in China and abroad. Identification of the 1811 report on secret societies in Dutch, which had been considered the earliest, was succeeded in the 1811 Belgian publication. Its attribution to French naturalist L. T. Leschenault de la Tour (1773–1826) is proven. The French original of this account is identified; its text larger version and divergences from the Dutch translation are indicated. The circum-stances of Leschenault's obtaining information of the Chinese secret societies in China on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies are examined. A linguistic commentary is given on the dialect names of the secret societies and the Chinese personal names of its leadership reported by him. The Russian explorer I.F. Kruzenshtern is described as the first European to report on secret societies in China in Part 2 of the Russian edition of his Voyage Round the World ... of the 1810. The exact time of the original German edition publication of this book is specified. Variety of assessments of secret societies’ nature by Kruzenshtern and Leshenault are elucidated. Their difference from later assessments by Protestant missionaries W. Milne and R. Morrison, who proposed the ‘Masonic paradigm’ is demonstrated. The four original texts by Kruzenshtern and Leshenault with their accounts of secret societies in China are provided as Supplements.

Chinese Personal Names Expressing the Idea of Manliness

The study attempts to analyze modern Chinese male personal names from the standpoint of the semantics of the most frequently used lexemes, thereby revealing a corpus of words (hieroglyphs) that serve to designate “masculine” in the Chinese name system. The author relies on the recent data obtained from a survey with 200 respondents, however, historical Chinese male names are also considered. It is established that in Chinese linguistic culture, masculinity is a multifaceted concept, essentially associated with such qualities as strength, perseverance, will, determination, the ability to withstand any life challenges. The name semantics may convey that both through direct definitions (“strong”, “solid”, “strong”, “resolute”, etc.), and through images in which these qualities are embodied allegorically (“wave”, “dragon”, “tiger”, “cypress”, etc.). At the same time, Chinese male names of the 20th century also showcase the semantics related to the history of the country, citizenship, patriotism (“Shine, China”, “Make the country strong”, etc.). The author notes that since the Confucian era, such qualities as wisdom, humanity, benevolence, following etiquette, and flexibility have been blended into the “male” semantics. Apparently, these are the newly adopted virtues of manliness, without which it would be impossible to survive in the modern world.

Chinese Personal Name Disambiguation Based on Clustering

Personal name disambiguation is a significant issue in natural language processing, which is the basis for many tasks in automatic information processing. This research explores the Chinese personal name disambiguation based on clustering technique. Preprocessing is applied to transform raw corpus into standardized format at the beginning. And then, Chinese word segmentation, part‐of‐speech tagging, and named entity recognition are accomplished by lexical analysis. Furthermore, we make an effort to extract features that can better disambiguate Chinese personal names. Some rules for identifying target personal names are created to improve the experimental effect. Additionally, many calculation methods of feature weights are implemented such as bool weight, absolute frequency weight, tf‐idf weight, and entropy weight. As for clustering algorithm, an agglomerative hierarchical clustering is selected by comparison with other clustering methods. Finally, a labeling approach is employed to bring forward feature words that can represent each cluster. The experiment achieves a good result for five groups of Chinese personal names.

Signs of Cultural Significance in the Works of Mo Yan Translated into Russian

The authors of this article analyze Russian translations of non-translatable linguistic signs in the works of Chinese writer Mo Yan, prize laureate of the Nobel Prize in 2012. In his works, the writer amply uses culturally-bound words and phrases as well as folklore and tales meaningful for Chinese material, social and spiritual culture. Some of them are cultural constants traditionally associated with emotional, axiological and aesthetic values. Mo Yan’s style includes common language, idioms, even swear words alongside vernacular parables and ditties. As a whole, his style itself is the embodiment of Chinese common culture, which presents a seemingly insoluble task for translators — how to translate the non-translatable, to recreate in Russian not just the style but the culture itself. The authors explore both the translators’ solutions and inevitable shifts and losses determined in the process of interaction between the two very different languages and cultures. Particular attention is paid to translators’ solutions for the symbolic functions of Chinese personal names. In addition, complications connected with the transfer of Chinese everyday realia, customs and traditions that appear as important components in the structure of images and contents of Mo Yan’s works are considered. An attempt is made to reconstruct some important components of the intercultural area that emerges in the course of translation from Chinese into Russian.

On the Construction of Web NER Model Training Tool based on Distant Supervision

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in natural language understanding, as it extracts the key entities (person, organization, location, date, number, etc.) and objects (product, song, movie, activity name, etc.) mentioned in texts. However, existing natural language processing (NLP) tools (such as Stanford NER) recognize only general named entities or require annotated training examples and feature engineering for supervised model construction. Since not all languages or entities have public NER support, constructing a tool for NER model training is essential for low-resource language or entity information extraction. In this article, we study the problem of developing a tool to prepare training corpus from the Web with known seed entities for custom NER model training via distant supervision. The major challenge of automatic labeling lies in the long labeling time due to large corpus and seed entities as well as the concern to avoid false positive and false negative examples due to short and long seeds. To solve this problem, we adopt locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) for various length of seed entities. We conduct experiments on five types of entity recognition tasks, including Chinese person names, food names, locations, points of interest (POIs), and activity names to demonstrate the improvements with the proposed Web NER model construction tool. Because the training corpus is obtained by automatic labeling of the seed entity–related sentences, one could use either the entire corpus or the positive only sentences for model training. Based on the experimental results, we found the decision should depend on whether traditional linear chained conditional random fields (CRF) or deep neural network–based CRF is used for model training as well as the completeness of the provided seed list.

Chinese Name as a Complex Mythological Sign

There are three kind of onomastic systems in the world – mythological, theocentric and anthropocentric. The difference between them is in the attitude to the phenomenon of name and naming, what finally reflects on characteristics of proper names as grammatical category. The aim of the article – is to demonstrate and to try to proof the thesis that onomastic system of Chinese language has features of mythological kind of onomastic systems which is meant to be typical for ancient societies. The example of Chinese names is very illustrative due to linguistic and extralinguistic facts. Linguistic facts are: grammatical system of the language is isolating, ideographic writing system etc. Extralinguistic facts: features of Chinese philosophy, logic, culture etc. The data of the investigation – are modern Chinese personal names. Main methods of analysis are comparative, interpretative etc. The semantics of the Chinese anthroponym as mythological sign can be considered syncretic, because subjective, numerous interpretations of the given name attached to the identity of the name bearer. According to Roland Bart, in myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is built into the other; firstly, the linguistic system, the language, called by R. Bart the language-object, since it comes at the disposal of a myth that builds on its basis its own system; secondly, this is the myth itself, it can be called a metalanguage, because it is the second language spoken about the first. Thus, a signifier in a myth can be viewed from two points of view: as a resultant element of a language system or as an initial element of a mythological system. The precedent of the Chinese naming system is that this mythology of the name has not disappeared, has not become part of something else, has not been reduced, it, appearing several millennia ago, demonstrates a continuous continuous development.

Problem przekładu imion biblijnych na język chiński w „Biblii Bożonarodzeniowej”

Chińskie osobowe nazwy własne mają specyficzną strukturę. Ponadto język chiński jest językiem sugestywnym, który granice semantyczne poszerza poprzez pisane obrazy w swoich znakach. Stąd też tłumacze tekstów na język chiński, w tym tłumacze Biblii, stoją przed trudnym wyzwaniem. Jest ono szczególnie interesujące w tłumaczeniach imion, które polega na takim doborze znaków, by nie dopuścić do niepożądanych skojarzeń znaczeniowych poprzez np. skupianie się jedynie na podobieństwie fonetycznym, ale tak dobrać znaki, by zawrzeć w nich jak najbardziej harmonijne treści z kontekstem historycznym, społecznym czy osobistym posiadacza danego imienia. Pierwszym katolickim tłumaczem całej Biblii był bł. Gabriele Allegra, tworzący wraz zespołem tzw. „Biblię Betlejemską” lub „Bożonarodzeniową”, a jego zmagania z tłumaczeniem imion zostały zaprezentowane w niniejszym artykule na przykładach kilku imion: Jabes, Benoni, Beniamin, Dariusz, Jezus Chrystus. Wymagało to od całego zespołu tłumaczy niezwykle wnikliwej znajomości kultury i języka chińskiego oraz całej Biblii

Use and Presentation of Personal Name Components in Chinese Authority Files

This study explores means of coping with the increase in homonymous personal name files in authority control systems. To improve the accuracy with which such files are distinguished, we suggest developing systematic rules for handling additional components—elements frequently, but inconsistently, associated with personal name authority files in various authority control schemes. We describe the general usage of these components for Chinese personal names, along with the influence of these use patterns on the quality of name authority files. To illustrate our points, we offer a statistical analysis of the top 100 personal names (i.e., those with the greatest number of homonymous entries) from the name duplication list in the three most influential databases in China: HKCAN, NLC and CALIS. Statistics of name duplication, along with type and use frequency of additional components, are described and analyzed. We also analyze the discriminating power of three frequently-used types of additional information. Finally, we point out various issues which have impeded the broader and more systematic use of additional components.

Chinese Person Name Disambiguation Based on Two-Stage Clustering

Person name clustering disambiguation is the process that partitions name mentions according to corresponding target person entities in reality. The existed methods can not realize effective identification of important features to disambiguate person names. This paper presents a method of Chinese person name disambiguation based on two-stage clustering. This method adopts a stage-by-stage processing model to identify and utilize different types of important features. Firstly, we extract three kinds of core evidences namely direct social relation, indirect social relation and common description prefix, recognize document-pairs referring to the same person entity, and realize initial clustering of person names with high precision. Then, we take the result of initial clustering as new initial input, utilize the statistical properties of multi-documents to recognize and evaluate important features, and build a double-vector representation of clusters (cluster feature vector and important feature vector). Based on the processes above, the final clustering of person names is generated, and the recall of clustering is improved effectively. The experiments have been conducted on the dataset of CLP2010 Chinese person names disambiguation, and experimental results show that this method has good performance in person name clustering disambiguation.

Incorporating multi-kernel function and Internet verification for Chinese person name disambiguation

The study on person name disambiguation aims to identify different entities with the same person name through document linking to different entities. The traditional disambiguation approach makes use of words in documents as features to distinguish different entities. Due to the lack of use of word order as a feature and the limited use of external knowledge, the traditional approach has performance limitations. This paper presents an approach for named entity disambiguation through entity linking based on a multikernel function and Internet verification to improve Chinese person name disambiguation. The proposed approach extends a linear kernel that uses in-document word features by adding a string kernel to construct a multi-kernel function. This multi-kernel can then calculate the similarities between an input document and the entity descriptions in a named person knowledge base to form a ranked list of candidates to different entities. Furthermore, Internet search results based on keywords extracted from the input document and entity descriptions in the knowledge base are used to train classifiers for verification. The evaluations on CIPS-SIGHAN 2012 person name disambiguation bakeoff dataset show that the use of word orders and Internet knowledge through a multi-kernel function can improve both precision and recall and our system has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Were “Ugly Slaves” in Medieval China Really Ugly?


 
 
 Extending the author’s previous studies of Chinese onomastics, this paper examines the true meaning of a large group of medieval Chinese personal names containing the character chou, “ugly.” Contrary to conventional interpretation, it is found, based on contemporary inscriptional data, that these names actually marked the birth-year of the name-bearers. Further, they represented a special case of theophoric names newly introduced from Iranian-speaking Central Asia, and reflected the deification and anthropomorphization of the twelve-animal cycle. The paper also provides a succinct description of the general genre of Chinese opprobrious names, which are found to be closely related to similar names in Central Asia. Both findings help illustrate pre-Islamic Iranian-Sogdian cultural influence in China.
 
 

TŁUMACZENIE POŚWIADCZONE CHIŃSKICH AKTÓW I POŚWIADCZEŃ NOTARIALNYCH

This article discusses the translation of Chinese notarial certificates from the perspective of sworn translation. Given the challenges of legal translation in general and sworn translation in particular, the issue in question calls for clearly established translation criteria. The author decided to adopt the recommendations included in The Sworn Translator’s Code, issued by The Polish Society of Sworn and Specialized Translators, and Adequacy Conditions proposed by Roberto Mayoral (2000, 9-11). The analysis of Chinese notarial certificates focuses on the formal requirements of sworn translation, stylistic adequacy and the transliteration rules for Chinese personal names and addresses.

Automatic Recognition of Chinese Personal Name Using Conditional Random Fields and Knowledge Base

According to the features of Chinese personal name, we present an approach for Chinese personal name recognition based on conditional random fields (CRF) and knowledge base in this paper. The method builds multiple features of CRF model by adopting Chinese character as processing unit, selects useful features based on selection algorithm of knowledge base and incremental feature template, and finally implements the automatic recognition of Chinese personal name from Chinese document. The experimental results on open real corpus demonstrated the effectiveness of our method and obtained high accuracy rate and high recall rate of recognition.

中国人・団体著者名典拠データの表記の相違

中国人・団体著者名典拠データの表記の相違

On the English version of Chinese personal names

The representation of Chinese personal names in English is very confusing, and important features of the Chinese language and naming practice are more or less lost. After a close look at the Chinese linguistic forms, especially in Mandarin Chinese, and at Chinese naming practice, we would suggest that translators should respect the source culture more instead of rendering it randomly, as reflected in the different English versions of Chinese personal names.

A Pre-Identification Method for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

In this paper, a pre-identification method for Chinese named entity recognition is proposed. Internal information of entity name like family name, first name in person name, feature word in place name and organization name do not needed. Through entity name guessing based on context keywords, pre-identification is realized. Definition of bidirectional potential entity name recognition, rough confirmation of potential entity name, segmentation word is proposed. To solve the possible ambiguity in entity name identification, the degree of segmentation and conjunction is presented as well as cascade recognition and final confirmation. Combining with this pre-processing method, performance will be improved by using internal information of entity name. Experiment proves that the method have a special advantage in recognition special entity name, ambiguity name and irregular name. In this paper, Chinese person name is taken as an example for entity name recognition. Nevertheless, the method is not limit to person name recognition but also a pre-identification method for other entity name.

Person Name Disambiguation of Searching Results Using Social Network

The person names are so ambiguous that the results for searching a person name are usually a mixture of pages about the namesakes. This paper presents a novel approach leveraging the fact that each namesake has a unique social community. Firstly,the social network of the person name to search is found and extended by employing the co-occurrence of person names in snippets returned by a search engine,then automatically clustered into different social communities by the algorithm combining spectral partition and modularity evaluation. Finally,the search results are clustered into different groups where each contains pages referring to the same individual. On the corpus of Chinese person names,experimental results show that the whole performance achieves high level and graph clustering algorithm benefits improving disambiguation effect from further dividing the connecting social network.

Closing the Loop in Webpage Understanding

The two most important tasks in information extraction from the Web are webpage structure understanding and natural language sentences processing. However, little work has been done toward an integrated statistical model for understanding webpage structures and processing natural language sentences within the HTML elements. Our recent work on webpage understanding introduces a joint model of Hierarchical Conditional Random Fields (HCRFs) and extended Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields (Semi-CRFs) to leverage the page structure understanding results in free text segmentation and labeling. In this top-down integration model, the decision of the HCRF model could guide the decision making of the Semi-CRF model. However, the drawback of the top-down integration strategy is also apparent, i.e., the decision of the Semi-CRF model could not be used by the HCRF model to guide its decision making. This paper proposed a novel framework called WebNLP, which enables bidirectional integration of page structure understanding and text understanding in an iterative manner. We have applied the proposed framework to local business entity extraction and Chinese person and organization name extraction. Experiments show that the WebNLP framework achieved significantly better performance than existing methods.