Perspective of Digital Humanities on Person Names in Chinese Pre-Qin Classic

Abstract

Knowledge annotation and mining from ancient Chinese classics have become a new trend in digital humanities research in China, and historical persons get the most attention. However, few studies have focused exclusively on person names, which is rather important for understanding Chinese traditional culture. This study focused on person names in Chinese Pre-Qin classics. We conducted a humanities computing study on Pre-Qin person name knowledge through an in-depth categorization and manual annotation of person name components. The results included the disambiguation of person names, a statistical distribution of famous persons, patterns in name components, and statistical analysis of name components. Furthermore, machine learning methods on the NER of person name knowledge were also examined, indicating the feasibility of future related research.