Chujian 楚简

🤗 Datasets | Paper (Upcoming) | Chinese

This repository contains the official code for the paper Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (Upcoming link).

Chu bamboo slips (CBS, Chinese: 楚简, pronounced as chujian) is an ancient Chinese script used during the Spring and Autumn period over 2,000 years ago. The study of which hold great significant value for understanding the history and culture of Ancient China. We scraped, processed, annotated, and then released the first large-scale dataset for machine learning community. It is named CHUBS, and contains over 100K annotated CBS characters. Additionally, we propose a novel multi-model multi-granularity tokenizer tailored for handling the large number of out-of-vocabulary characters in CBS (characters that have no modern Chinese equivalence).

Data

All our datasets are provided at https://huggingface.co/datasets/chen-yingfa/CHUBS

The data are sourced from the following.

Source name	Chinese name	# documents	# slips	# characters
Tsinghua University Slips	清华简	50	1,402	31,468
Shanghai Museum Slips	上博简	60	881	25,795
Baoshan Slips	包山简	4	337	12,647
Guodian Slips	郭店简	18	705	11,865
Geling Slips	葛陵简	8	743	6,209
Zenghouyi Slips	曾侯乙简	4	198	6,016
Jiudian Slips	九店简	2	232	2,956
Wangshan Slips	望山简	3	273	2,218
Changtaiguan Slips	长台关简	3	148	1,504
Zidanku Silk	子弹库帛	7	7	1,471
Yangtianhu Slips	仰天湖简	1	42	335
Wulipai Slips	五里牌简	1	18	109
Xiyangpo Slips	夕阳坡简	1	2	54
Ynagjiawan Slips	杨家湾简	1	38	41
Caojiagang Slips	曹家岗简	1	7	34
Total		164	5,033	102,722

It contains the following two parts.

1. The main dataset (CHUBS). Each example is an image of a CBS character and the correponding label. The label is the name of the directory that the image file belongs to.
2. A small part-of-speech (POS) tagging dataset of CBS text.

And, the file structure is as follows.

- glyphs.zip
- pos-tagging-data/
    - dev_examples.json
    - dev_examples_subchars.json
    - test_examples.json
    - test_exampels_subchars.json
    - train_examples.json
    - train_examples_subchars.json

CHUBS is contained within the glyphs.zip file while the latter is under the directory pos-tagging-data. The files with the _subchars suffix is the same data examples as the original file but each character is split into its sub-character components (see the paper for more details).

Experiments

This repo contains three sets of experiments, the code of each experiment is under its own directory.

1. Character Recognition
2. Sub-Character Component Recognition
3. POS Tagging

Copyright Concerns

As mentioned in the paper, the main CHUBS dataset is extracted and processed from existing openly available textbooks and quality-checked by our team. Compiling and analyzing such data is a common practice within the paleography field in ancient Chinese script, and we have consulted with legal experts to make sure that this data can be released under a permissive license such as Apache 2.0. The POS tagging data is annotated by our team, and also has no legal concerns related to its usage.