TongGu: Mastering Classical Chinese Understanding with Knowledge-Grounded Large Language Models
This addresses comprehension barriers in Classical Chinese for modern users, representing a domain-specific advancement with incremental improvements in model tuning and retrieval techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of Classical Chinese Understanding (CCU) by proposing TongGu, a knowledge-grounded large language model, which achieves superior performance across 24 diverse CCU tasks through methods like Redundancy-Aware Tuning and CCU-RAG.
Classical Chinese is a gateway to the rich heritage and wisdom of ancient China, yet its complexities pose formidable comprehension barriers for most modern people without specialized knowledge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), they struggle with Classical Chinese Understanding (CCU), especially in data-demanding and knowledge-intensive tasks. In response to this dilemma, we propose \textbf{TongGu} (mean understanding ancient and modern), the first CCU-specific LLM, underpinned by three core contributions. First, we construct a two-stage instruction-tuning dataset ACCN-INS derived from rich classical Chinese corpora, aiming to unlock the full CCU potential of LLMs. Second, we propose Redundancy-Aware Tuning (RAT) to prevent catastrophic forgetting, enabling TongGu to acquire new capabilities while preserving its foundational knowledge. Third, we present a CCU Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CCU-RAG) technique to reduce hallucinations based on knowledge-grounding. Extensive experiments across 24 diverse CCU tasks validate TongGu's superior ability, underscoring the effectiveness of RAT and CCU-RAG. The model and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/TongGu-LLM}.