From Text to Historical Ecological Knowledge: The Construction and Application of the Shan Jing Knowledge Base

Ke Liang, Chu Ren Huang, Xin Lan Jiang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) has been recognized as a shared cultural heritage and a crucial instrument to tackle today's environmental challenges. In this paper, we deal with historical ecological knowledge, a special type of TEK that is based on ancient language texts. In particular, we aim to build a language resource based on Shanhai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas). Written 2000 years ago, Shanhai Jing is a record of flora and fauna in ancient China, anchored by mountains (shan) and seas (hai). This study focuses on the entities in the Shan Jing part and builds a knowledge base for them. We adopt a pattern-driven and bottom-up strategy to accommodate two features of the source: highly stylized narrative and juxtaposition of knowledge from multiple domains. The PRF values of both entity and relationship extraction are above 96%. Quality assurance measures like entity disambiguation and resolution were done by domain experts. Neo4j graph database is used to visualize the result. We think the knowledge base, containing 1432 systematically classified entities and 3294 relationships, can provide the foundation for the construction of a historical ecological knowledge base of China. Additionally, the ruled-based text-matching method can be helpful in ancient language processing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages7521-7530
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9782493814104
Publication statusPublished - May 2024
EventJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Hybrid, Torino, Italy
Duration: 20 May 202425 May 2024

Publication series

Name2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings

Conference

ConferenceJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityHybrid, Torino
Period20/05/2425/05/24

Keywords

  • ancient language processing
  • knowledge base
  • Shan Jing
  • Traditional Ecological Knowledge

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications

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