Research on ancient Chinese language is of great significance for tracing Chinese history and civilization. In the field of large language models, studies on the pre-Qin excavated documents such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Bronze Inscriptions, and Bamboo Book of Chu remain insufficient. This is because these ancient characters have a low level of digitization, training corpora are extremely scarce, and they typically contain complex and rich semantic information. Therefore, we propose an ancient character semantic-aware embedding for large language models. This embedding integrates both the glyph and lexicality of ancient characters and maps them to the modern Chinese semantic space. We also design a two-stage method for lightweight and parameter-efficient training of the embedding. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on excavated documents from the pre-Qin period, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Interactive argument pair identification is an emerging research task for argument mining, aiming to identify whether two arguments are interactively related. It is pointed out that the context of the argument is essential to improve identification performance. However, current context-based methods achieve limited improvements since the entire context typically contains much irrelevant information. In this paper, we propose a simple contrastive learning framework to solve this problem by extracting valuable information from the context. This framework can construct hard argument-context samples and obtain a robust and uniform representation by introducing contrastive learning. We also propose an argument-context extraction module to enhance information extraction by discarding irrelevant blocks. The experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark dataset. Further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed modules and visually displays more compact semantic representations.

Modern Chinese characters evolved from 3,000 years ago. Up to now, tens of thousands of glyphs of ancient characters have been discovered, which must be deciphered by experts to interpret unearthed documents. Experts usually need to compare each ancient character to be examined with similar known ones in whole historical periods. However, it is inevitably limited by human memory and experience, which often cost a lot of time but associations are limited to a small scope. To help researchers discover glyph similar characters, this paper introduces ZiNet, the first diachronic knowledge base describing relationships and evolution of Chinese characters and words. In addition, powered by the knowledge of radical systems in ZiNet, this paper introduces glyph similarity measurement between ancient Chinese characters, which could capture similar glyph pairs that are potentially related in origins or semantics. Results show strong positive correlations between scores from the method and from human experts. Finally, qualitative analysis and implicit future applications are presented.