Documentation, Informaiton & Knowledge ›› 2022, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (1): 51-60.doi: 10.13366/j.dik.2022.01.051

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Automatic Reorganization of Historical Records from Time Dimension: From the Perspective of Digital Humanities

  

  • Online:2022-01-10 Published:2022-03-19

Abstract:

[Purpose/Significance] Under the perspective of digital humanities, we aimed to propose a solution to deal with the problems of ancient Chinese time expressions — ellipsis, coreference, ambiguity, and vagueness. Our research will make readers obtain the historical records of a period from kinds of history books written in biographical style, national style, and chronicle style. [Design/Methodology] Based on summarizing the types and features of ancient Chinese temporal expressions, this paper puts forward a fulltext time-line reorganization system for historical books. The method firstly recognizes the ancient Chinese time description and performs semantic analysis, then identifies the event sentences and associates them with time description. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the recombination of The Records of the Grand Historian(Shi Ji), a biographical historical book, and Discourses of the States (Guo Yu), a national historical book, to test the validity of the method. [Findings/Conclusion] The method proposed in this article could realize the reorganization of historical books by time which were written in biographical style and national style. It could also achieve high accuracy while reducing manual labeling. [Originality/Value] Orienting to the characteristics of ambiguity and common reference in the ancient Chinese time expressions, this paper proposes a system to automatically reorganize the contents of historical books based upon time, and verifies the validity of the system through experiments.


Key words: Digital humanities, Historical records, Ancient Chinese temporal expression processing, Ancient Chinese time expression disambiguation, Event-time relation extraction