Flexible Computing Services for Comparisons and Analyses of Classical Chinese Poetry
This work provides computational tools for academic research in Chinese linguistics and poetry analysis, though it appears incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
The researchers tackled the analysis of classical Chinese poetry by collecting nine corpora spanning 1046 BCE to 1644 CE and developing flexible tools, resulting in new methods for comparing poet word preferences and studying historical word usage.
We collect nine corpora of representative Chinese poetry for the time span of 1046 BCE and 1644 CE for studying the history of Chinese words, collocations, and patterns. By flexibly integrating our own tools, we are able to provide new perspectives for approaching our goals. We illustrate the ideas with two examples. The first example show a new way to compare word preferences of poets, and the second example demonstrates how we can utilize our corpora in historical studies of the Chinese words. We show the viability of the tools for academic research, and we wish to make it helpful for enriching existing Chinese dictionary as well.