Siyu Duan

Siyu Duan, Jun Wang, Qi Su

Cultural heritage serves as the enduring record of human thought and history. Despite significant efforts dedicated to the preservation of cultural relics, many ancient artefacts have been ravaged irreversibly by natural deterioration and human actions. Deep learning technology has emerged as a valuable tool for restoring various kinds of cultural heritages, including ancient text restoration. Previous research has approached ancient text restoration from either visual or textual perspectives, often overlooking the potential of synergizing multimodal information. This paper proposes a novel Multimodal Multitask Restoring Model (MMRM) to restore ancient texts, particularly emphasising the ideograph. This model combines context understanding with residual visual information from damaged ancient artefacts, enabling it to predict damaged characters and generate restored images simultaneously. We tested the MMRM model through experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and authentic ancient inscriptions. The results show that the proposed method gives insightful restoration suggestions in both simulation experiments and real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering application of multimodal deep learning in ancient text restoration, which will contribute to the understanding of ancient society and culture in digital humanities fields.

Siyu Duan

The connection between texts is referred to as intertextuality in literary theory, which served as an important theoretical basis in many digital humanities studies. Over the past decade, advancements in natural language processing have ushered intertextuality studies into the quantitative age. Large-scale intertextuality research based on cutting-edge methods has continuously emerged. This paper provides a roadmap for quantitative intertextuality studies, summarizing their data, methods, and applications. Drawing on data from multiple languages and topics, this survey reviews methods from statistics to deep learning. It also summarizes their applications in humanities and social sciences research and the associated platform tools. Driven by advances in computer technology, more precise, diverse, and large-scale intertext studies can be anticipated. Intertextuality holds promise for broader application in interdisciplinary research bridging AI and the humanities.

Siyu Duan, Wei Li, Cai Jing et al.

Online advertising is an important revenue source for many IT companies. In the search advertising scenario, advertisement text that meets the need of the search query would be more attractive to the user. However, the manual creation of query-variant advertisement texts for massive items is expensive. Traditional text generation methods tend to focus on the general searching needs with high frequency while ignoring the diverse personalized searching needs with low frequency. In this paper, we propose the query-variant advertisement text generation task that aims to generate candidate advertisement texts for different web search queries with various needs based on queries and item keywords. To solve the problem of ignoring low-frequency needs, we propose a dynamic association mechanism to expand the receptive field based on external knowledge, which can obtain associated words to be added to the input. These associated words can serve as bridges to transfer the ability of the model from the familiar high-frequency words to the unfamiliar low-frequency words. With association, the model can make use of various personalized needs in queries and generate query-variant advertisement texts. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our model can generate more attractive advertisement text than baselines.