A Comparative Analysis of Word Segmentation, Part-of-Speech Tagging, and Named Entity Recognition for Historical Chinese Sources, 1900-1950

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fang, Zhao, Wu, Liang-Chun, Kong, Xuening, Stewart, Spencer Dean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fang, Zhao
Wu, Liang-Chun
Kong, Xuening
Stewart, Spencer Dean
author_facet Fang, Zhao
Wu, Liang-Chun
Kong, Xuening
Stewart, Spencer Dean
contents This paper compares large language models (LLMs) and traditional natural language processing (NLP) tools for performing word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and named entity recognition (NER) on Chinese texts from 1900 to 1950. Historical Chinese documents pose challenges for text analysis due to their logographic script, the absence of natural word boundaries, and significant linguistic changes. Using a sample dataset from the Shanghai Library Republican Journal corpus, traditional tools such as Jieba and spaCy are compared to LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and the GLM series. The results show that LLMs outperform traditional methods in all metrics, albeit at considerably higher computational costs, highlighting a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, LLMs better handle genre-specific challenges such as poetry and temporal variations (i.e., pre-1920 versus post-1920 texts), demonstrating that their contextual learning capabilities can advance NLP approaches to historical texts by reducing the need for domain-specific training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Comparative Analysis of Word Segmentation, Part-of-Speech Tagging, and Named Entity Recognition for Historical Chinese Sources, 1900-1950
Fang, Zhao
Wu, Liang-Chun
Kong, Xuening
Stewart, Spencer Dean
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This paper compares large language models (LLMs) and traditional natural language processing (NLP) tools for performing word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and named entity recognition (NER) on Chinese texts from 1900 to 1950. Historical Chinese documents pose challenges for text analysis due to their logographic script, the absence of natural word boundaries, and significant linguistic changes. Using a sample dataset from the Shanghai Library Republican Journal corpus, traditional tools such as Jieba and spaCy are compared to LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and the GLM series. The results show that LLMs outperform traditional methods in all metrics, albeit at considerably higher computational costs, highlighting a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, LLMs better handle genre-specific challenges such as poetry and temporal variations (i.e., pre-1920 versus post-1920 texts), demonstrating that their contextual learning capabilities can advance NLP approaches to historical texts by reducing the need for domain-specific training data.
title A Comparative Analysis of Word Segmentation, Part-of-Speech Tagging, and Named Entity Recognition for Historical Chinese Sources, 1900-1950
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19844