TEACH: A Contrastive Knowledge Adaptive Distillation Framework for Classical Chinese Understanding

Yuting Wei, Qi Meng, Yuanxing Xu, Bin Wu


Abstract
Traditional methods for processing classical Chinese typically segment language understanding into discrete tasks, which overlook crucial background information and reduce user engagement. Large language models (LLMs) provide integrated solutions, yet they entail high computational costs and risks of generating inaccurate historical information. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework, TEACH (conTrastive knowlEdge Adaptive distillation with enhanCed Historical interpretability), which focuses on classical Chinese understanding by integrating word sense disambiguation with sentence translation. This integration leverages a confidence-annotated knowledge base and a step-by-step Chain-of-Thought prompting mechanism to minimize hallucinations and improve semantic analysis. Moreover, TEACH employs contrastive distillation learning to efficiently transfer capabilities from larger models to smaller ones (e.g., Qwen2-1.5B), addressing overly liberal translations. Additionally, we introduce an innovative generation evaluation metric using iterative word alignment, enhancing LLM performance assessments by distinguishing additional information and addressing excessive translation issues. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets validate TEACH’s efficacy in classical Chinese educational scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.178
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3537–3550
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.178/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuting Wei, Qi Meng, Yuanxing Xu, and Bin Wu. 2025. TEACH: A Contrastive Knowledge Adaptive Distillation Framework for Classical Chinese Understanding. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3537–3550, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TEACH: A Contrastive Knowledge Adaptive Distillation Framework for Classical Chinese Understanding (Wei et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.178.pdf