Search Results (6)

This study proposes a new benchmark to evaluate the cultural understanding and natural language processing capabilities of large language models based on Sino-Korean words and four-character idioms. Those are essential linguistic and cultural assets in Korea. Reflecting the official question types of the Korean Hanja Proficiency Test, we constructed four question categories—four-character idioms, synonyms, antonyms, and homophones—and systematically compared the performance of GPT-based and non-GPT LLMs. GPT-4o showed the highest accuracy and explanation quality. However, challenges remain in distinguishing the subtle nuances of individual characters and in adapting to uniquely Korean meanings as opposed to standard Chinese character interpretations. Our findings reveal a gap in LLMs’ understanding of Korea-specific Hanja culture and underscore the need for evaluation tools reflecting these cultural distinctions. Full article

This paper investigates the term “sea” (hai) in the four-character Chinese idioms according to conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory, attempting to illustrate their conceptualization, determine their possible underlying motivations, and explore Chinese maritime thought and culture. Based on idiomatic expressions, three types of conceptual metaphors are identified: abstract qualities of concrete entities are the sea, abstract entity is sea, and a certain aspect of a human being is sea. Moreover, the four types of conceptual metonymies are the part for the whole, the whole for the part, the place for the product, and the place for the responsible deities or goddesses. They are motivated by a culture of worship of and accordance with nature, the pursuit of achievements in traditional Chinese literature, “man paid, nature made” as the attitude towards the ups and downs of life, and a self-centered conceptualization of the world. The maritime culture represented in these conceptualizations comprises fear of and respect for the sea, harmony between humans and the sea, and static–dynamic integrations of river, land, and sea. The findings show that the motivations of these conceptualizations do not only originate from the embodiment and Chinese philosophy of the unity of heaven and humanity but are also constrained by the most influential talent selection mechanism, the Imperial Examination System, as well as by agriculture, the foundation of the economy in ancient China. Full article

Idioms are a unique class of words in the Chinese language that can be challenging for Chinese machine reading comprehension due to their formal simplicity and the potential mismatch between their literal and figurative meanings. To address this issue, this paper adopted the “2 + 2” structure as the representation model for idiom structure feature extraction. According to the linguistic theory of idioms, to enhance the model’s learning ability for idiom semantics, we propose a two-stage semantic expansion method that leverages semantic knowledge during the pre-training stage and extracts idiom interpretation information during the fine-tuning stage to improve the model’s understanding of idioms. Moreover, with the consideration of the inferential interaction between global and local information during context fusion, which is neglected by all current works, we propose a method that utilizes a multi-headed attention mechanism to fully extract global and local information by selecting three attention patterns in the fine-tuning stage. This enables the fusion of semantic information extracted by the model at different granularities, leading to improved accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed BERT-IDM model outperformed the baseline BERT model by achieving a 4.1% accuracy improvement. Full article

The Chinese writing system, known as hanzi or Han character, is fundamentally pictographic, composed of clusters of strokes. Nowadays, there are over 85,000 individual characters, making it difficult even for a native speaker to recognize the precise meaning of everything one reads. However, specific clusters of strokes known as indexing radicals provide the semantic information of the whole character or even of an entire family of characters, are golden features in entry indexing in dictionaries and are essential in learning the Chinese language as a first or second idiom. Therefore, this work aims to identify the indexing radical of a hanzi from a picture through a convolutional neural network model with two layers and 15 classes. The model was validated for three calligraphy styles and presented an average F-score of ∼95.7% to classify 15 radicals within the known styles. For unknown fonts, the F-score varied according to the overall calligraphy size, thickness, and stroke nature and reached ∼83.0% for the best scenario. Subsequently, the model was evaluated on five ancient Chinese poems with a random set of hanzi, resulting in average F-scores of ∼86.0% and ∼61.4% disregarding and regarding the unknown indexing radicals, respectively. Full article

In the history of Chinese Bible translation, the Psalms have been a privileged site for the encounter between biblical thinking, poetics, and Chinese classical literature. This encounter was initiated by the translators of the Delegates’ Version, followed by John Chalmers, and outstandingly represented in particular by John C. H. Wu吳經熊. In his version of the Psalms, underpinned by his cultural stance of “beyond East and West”, Wu borrows numerous Chinese idioms and popular verses and transposes Chinese traditions from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Specifically, Wu’s rendition inaugurates an intertextual dialogue between the Psalms and Shijing, involving the disciplines of both comparative literature and comparative scripture at the same time. By adapting various Chinese classical poetry styles for his version of the Psalms, Wu transforms their spiritual traditions and broadens their representation spaces by injecting a Judeo-Christian spirit. Relocating the biblical texts among multifarious Chinese literary traditions, Wu’s translation of the Psalms achieves a deep interaction between the Bible and Chinese culture, provokes questions, and provides insights regarding the relation between biblical theology and intercultural poetics. Full article

Concern has been expressed in many parts of the world that community relations in rural areas are breaking down, making issues such as rural environmental degradation harder to resolve without external regulation. Guanxi is a specific Chinese idiom for characterizing social networks, as a broad term to represent existing relations among people, which can be loosely translated as ‘‘relationship’’. Based on a case study of an underdeveloped mountainous area of Southern China, this paper examined the problem from the perspective of guanxi, and explored the impacts of internal group differentiation catalyzed by pig farming pollution and the subsequent influences on the distribution of costs and benefits of different shareholders. It was found that the guanxi in the village were changed from blood relationship centered to economic interest centered. This disparity exerts a significant influence on the distribution of costs and benefits of pollution control and exacerbates environmental inequalities. This means that pig farmers dominated the narrative of pig farming pollution, while the ordinary villagers chose to suffer without protesting, which hinders the advancement of pollution control, and pig farmers took the benefits of weak pollution control and managed to transfer the external cost to others, while others became direct victims. The paper concludes that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer in both economic and environmental perspectives. It is strongly suggested that guanxi should be integrated into the consideration and decision-making process of rural environmental governance in order to guarantee the efficiency and efficacy of its implementation. Full article