Textual Analysis for Studying Chinese Historical Documents and Literary Novels

We analyzed historical and literary documents in Chinese to gain insights into research issues, and overview our studies which utilized four different sources of text materials in this paper. We investigated the history of concepts and transliterated words in China with the Database for the Study of Modern China Thought and Literature, which contains historical documents about China between 1830 and 1930. We also attempted to disambiguate names that were shared by multiple government officers who served between 618 and 1912 and were recorded in Chinese local gazetteers (地方志 /di4 fang1 zhi4/). To showcase the potentials and challenges of computer-assisted analysis of Chinese literatures, we explored some interesting yet non-trivial questions about two of the Four Great Classical Novels of China: (1) Which monsters attempted to consume the Buddhist monk Xuanzang in the Journey to the West (西遊記 /xi1 you2 ji4/, JTTW), which was published in the 16 century, (2) Which was the most powerful monster in JTTW, and (3) Which major role smiled the most in the Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢 /hong2 lou2 meng4/), which was published in the 18 century. Similar approaches can be applied to the analysis and study of modern documents, such as the newspaper articles published about the 228 incident that occurred in 1947 in Taiwan. CCS Concepts •Information systems➝Information retrieval •Information systems➝Retrieval tasks and goals •Information systems➝ Information extraction •Computing methodologies➝Natural language processing •Applied computin➝Arts and humanities