Introduction
Ancient Chinese is the writing language in ancient China. It is a treasure of Chinese culture which brings together the wisdom and ideas of the Chinese nation and chronicles the ancient cultural heritage of China. Learning ancient Chinese not only helps people to understand and inherit the wisdom of the ancients, but also promotes people to absorb and develop Chinese culture.
However, it is difficult for modern people to read ancient Chinese. Firstly, compared with modern Chinese, ancient Chinese is more concise and shorter. The grammatical order of modern Chinese is also quite different from that of ancient Chinese. Secondly, most modern Chinese words are double syllables, while the most of the ancient Chinese words are monosyllabic. Thirdly, there is more than one polysemous phenomenon in ancient Chinese. In addition, manual translation has a high cost. Therefore, it is meaningful and useful to study the automatic translation from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese. Through ancient-modern Chinese translation, the wisdom, talent and accumulated experience of the predecessors can be passed on to more people.
Neural machine translation (NMT) BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 has achieved remarkable performance on many bilingual translation tasks. It is an end-to-end learning approach for machine translation, with the potential to show great advantages over the statistic machine translation (SMT) systems. However, NMT approach has not been widely applied to the ancient-modern Chinese translation task. One of the main reasons is the limited high-quality parallel data resource.
The most popular method of acquiring translation examples is bilingual text alignment BIBREF5 . This kind of method can be classified into two types: lexical-based and statistical-based. The lexical-based approaches BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 focus on lexical information, which utilize the bilingual dictionary BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 or lexical features. Meanwhile, the statistical-based approaches BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 rely on statistical information, such as sentence length ratio in two languages and align mode probability.
However, these methods are designed for other bilingual language pairs that are written in different language characters (e.g. English-French, Chinese-Japanese). The ancient-modern Chinese has some characteristics that are quite different from other language pairs. For example, ancient and modern Chinese are both written in Chinese characters, but ancient Chinese is highly concise and its syntactical structure is different from modern Chinese. The traditional methods do not take these characteristics into account. In this paper, we propose an effective ancient-modern Chinese text alignment method at the level of clause based on the characteristics of these two languages. The proposed method combines both lexical-based information and statistical-based information, which achieves 94.2 F1-score on Test set. Recently, a simple longest common subsequence based approach for ancient-modern Chinese sentence alignment is proposed in BIBREF12 . Our experiments showed that our proposed alignment approach performs much better than their method.
We apply the proposed method to create a large translation parallel corpus which contains INLINEFORM0 1.24M bilingual sentence pairs. To our best knowledge, this is the first large high-quality ancient-modern Chinese dataset. Furthermore, we test SMT models and various NMT models on the created dataset and provide a strong baseline for this task.
Overview
There are four steps to build the ancient-modern Chinese translation dataset: (i) The parallel corpus crawling and cleaning. (ii) The paragraph alignment. (iii) The clause alignment based on aligned paragraphs. (iv) Augmenting data by merging aligned adjacent clauses. The most critical step is the third step.
Clause Alignment
In the clause alignment step, we combine both statistical-based and lexical-based information to measure the score for each possible clause alignment between ancient and modern Chinese strings. The dynamic programming is employed to further find overall optimal alignment paragraph by paragraph. According to the characteristics of the ancient and modern Chinese languages, we consider the following factors to measure the alignment score INLINEFORM0 between a bilingual clause pair:
Lexical Matching. The lexical matching score is used to calculate the matching coverage of the ancient clause INLINEFORM0 . It contains two parts: exact matching and dictionary matching. An ancient Chinese character usually corresponds to one or more modern Chinese words. In the first part, we carry out Chinese Word segmentation to the modern Chinese clause INLINEFORM1 . Then we match the ancient characters and modern words in the order from left to right. In further matching, the words that have been matched will be deleted from the original clauses.
However, some ancient characters do not appear in its corresponding modern Chinese words. An ancient Chinese dictionary is employed to address this issue. We preprocess the ancient Chinese dictionary and remove the stop words. In this dictionary matching step, we retrieve the dictionary definition of each unmatched ancient character and use it to match the remaining modern Chinese words. To reduce the impact of universal word matching, we use Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) to weight the matching words. The lexical matching score is calculated as: DISPLAYFORM0
The above equation is used to calculate the matching coverage of the ancient clause INLINEFORM0 . The first term of equation ( EQREF8 ) represents exact matching score. INLINEFORM1 denotes the length of INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 denotes each ancient character in INLINEFORM4 , and the indicator function INLINEFORM5 indicates whether the character INLINEFORM6 can match the words in the clause INLINEFORM7 . The second term is dictionary matching score. Here INLINEFORM8 and INLINEFORM9 represent the remaining unmatched strings of INLINEFORM10 and INLINEFORM11 , respectively. INLINEFORM12 denotes the INLINEFORM13 -th character in the dictionary definition of the INLINEFORM14 and its IDF score is denoted as INLINEFORM15 . The INLINEFORM16 is a predefined parameter which is used to normalize the IDF score. We tuned the value of this parameter on the Dev set.
Statistical Information. Similar to BIBREF11 and BIBREF6 , the statistical information contains alignment mode and length information. There are many alignment modes between ancient and modern Chinese languages. If one ancient Chinese clause aligns two adjacent modern Chinese clauses, we call this alignment as 1-2 alignment mode. We show some examples of different alignment modes in Figure FIGREF9 . In this paper, we only consider 1-0, 0-1, 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 and 2-2 alignment modes which account for INLINEFORM0 of the Dev set. We estimate the probability Pr INLINEFORM1 n-m INLINEFORM2 of each alignment mode n-m on the Dev set. To utilize length information, we make an investigation on length correlation between these two languages. Based on the assumption of BIBREF11 that each character in one language gives rise to a random number of characters in the other language and those random variables INLINEFORM3 are independent and identically distributed with a normal distribution, we estimate the mean INLINEFORM4 and standard deviation INLINEFORM5 from the paragraph aligned parallel corpus. Given a clause pair INLINEFORM6 , the statistical information score can be calculated by: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 denotes the normal distribution probability density function.
Edit Distance. Because ancient and modern Chinese are both written in Chinese characters, we also consider using the edit distance. It is a way of quantifying the dissimilarity between two strings by counting the minimum number of operations (insertion, deletion, and substitution) required to transform one string into the other. Here we define the edit distance score as: DISPLAYFORM0
Dynamic Programming. The overall alignment score for each possible clause alignment is as follows: DISPLAYFORM0
Here INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 are pre-defined interpolation factors. We use dynamic programming to find the overall optimal alignment paragraph by paragraph. Let INLINEFORM2 be total alignment scores of aligning the first to INLINEFORM3 -th ancient Chinese clauses with the first to to INLINEFORM4 -th modern Chinese clauses, and the recurrence then can be described as follows: DISPLAYFORM0
Where INLINEFORM0 denotes concatenate clause INLINEFORM1 to clause INLINEFORM2 . As we discussed above, here we only consider 1-0, 0-1, 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 and 2-2 alignment modes.
Ancient-Modern Chinese Dataset
Data Collection. To build the large ancient-modern Chinese dataset, we collected 1.7K bilingual ancient-modern Chinese articles from the internet. More specifically, a large part of the ancient Chinese data we used come from ancient Chinese history records in several dynasties (about 1000BC-200BC) and articles written by celebrities of that era. They used plain and accurate words to express what happened at that time, and thus ensure the generality of the translated materials.
Paragraph Alignment. To further ensure the quality of the new dataset, the work of paragraph alignment is manually completed. After data cleaning and manual paragraph alignment, we obtained 35K aligned bilingual paragraphs.
Clause Alignment. We applied our clause alignment algorithm on the 35K aligned bilingual paragraphs and obtained 517K aligned bilingual clauses. The reason we use clause alignment algorithm instead of sentence alignment is because we can construct more aligned sentences more flexibly and conveniently. To be specific, we can get multiple additional sentence level bilingual pairs by “data augmentation”.
Data Augmentation. We augmented the data in the following way: Given an aligned clause pair, we merged its adjacent clause pairs as a new sample pair. For example, suppose we have three adjacent clause level bilingual pairs: ( INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 ), ( INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 ), and ( INLINEFORM4 , INLINEFORM5 ). We can get some additional sentence level bilingual pairs, such as: ( INLINEFORM6 , INLINEFORM7 ) and ( INLINEFORM8 , INLINEFORM9 ). Here INLINEFORM10 , INLINEFORM11 , and INLINEFORM12 are adjacent clauses in the original paragraph, and INLINEFORM13 denotes concatenate clause INLINEFORM14 to clause INLINEFORM15 . The advantage of using this data augmentation method is that compared with only using ( INLINEFORM16 , INLINEFORM17 ) as the training data, we can also use ( INLINEFORM18 , INLINEFORM19 ) and ( INLINEFORM20 , INLINEFORM21 ) as the training data, which can provide richer supervision information for the model and make the model learn the align information between the source language and the target language better. After the data augmentation, we filtered the sentences which are longer than 50 or contain more than four clause pairs.
Dataset Creation. Finally, we split the dataset into three sets: training (Train), development (Dev) and testing (Test). Note that the unaugmented dataset contains 517K aligned bilingual clause pairs from 35K aligned bilingual paragraphs. To keep all the sentences in different sets come from different articles, we split the 35K aligned bilingual paragraphs into Train, Dev and Test sets following these ratios respectively: 80%, 10%, 10%. Before data augmentation, the unaugmented Train set contains INLINEFORM0 aligned bilingual clause pairs from 28K aligned bilingual paragraphs. Then we augmented the Train, Dev and Test sets respectively. Note that the augmented Train, Dev and Test sets also contain the unaugmented data. The statistical information of the three data sets is shown in Table TABREF17 . We show some examples of data in Figure FIGREF14 .
RNN-based NMT model
We first briefly introduce the RNN based Neural Machine Translation (RNN-based NMT) model. The RNN-based NMT with attention mechanism BIBREF0 has achieved remarkable performance on many translation tasks. It consists of encoder and decoder part.
We firstly introduce the encoder part. The input word sequence of source language are individually mapped into a INLINEFORM0 -dimensional vector space INLINEFORM1 . Then a bi-directional RNN BIBREF15 with GRU BIBREF16 or LSTM BIBREF17 cell converts these vectors into a sequences of hidden states INLINEFORM2 .
For the decoder part, another RNN is used to generate target sequence INLINEFORM0 . The attention mechanism BIBREF0 , BIBREF18 is employed to allow the decoder to refer back to the hidden state sequence and focus on a particular segment. The INLINEFORM1 -th hidden state INLINEFORM2 of decoder part is calculated as: DISPLAYFORM0
Here g INLINEFORM0 is a linear combination of attended context vector c INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 is the word embedding of (i-1)-th target word: DISPLAYFORM0
The attended context vector c INLINEFORM0 is computed as a weighted sum of the hidden states of the encoder: DISPLAYFORM0
The probability distribution vector of the next word INLINEFORM0 is generated according to the following: DISPLAYFORM0
We take this model as the basic RNN-based NMT model in the following experiments.
Transformer-NMT
Recently, the Transformer model BIBREF4 has made remarkable progress in machine translation. This model contains a multi-head self-attention encoder and a multi-head self-attention decoder.
As proposed by BIBREF4 , an attention function maps a query and a set of key-value pairs to an output, where the queries INLINEFORM0 , keys INLINEFORM1 , and values INLINEFORM2 are all vectors. The input consists of queries and keys of dimension INLINEFORM3 , and values of dimension INLINEFORM4 . The attention function is given by: DISPLAYFORM0
Multi-head attention mechanism projects queries, keys and values to INLINEFORM0 different representation subspaces and calculates corresponding attention. The attention function outputs are concatenated and projected again before giving the final output. Multi-head attention allows the model to attend to multiple features at different positions.
The encoder is composed of a stack of INLINEFORM0 identical layers. Each layer has two sub-layers: multi-head self-attention mechanism and position-wise fully connected feed-forward network. Similarly, the decoder is also composed of a stack of INLINEFORM1 identical layers. In addition to the two sub-layers in each encoder layer, the decoder contains a third sub-layer which performs multi-head attention over the output of the encoder stack (see more details in BIBREF4 ).
Experiments
Our experiments revolve around the following questions: Q1: As we consider three factors for clause alignment, do all these factors help? How does our method compare with previous methods? Q2: How does the NMT and SMT models perform on this new dataset we build?
Clause Alignment Results (Q1)
In order to evaluate our clause alignment algorithm, we manually aligned bilingual clauses from 37 bilingual ancient-modern Chinese articles, and finally got 4K aligned bilingual clauses as the Test set and 2K clauses as the Dev set.
Metrics. We used F1-score and precision score as the evaluation metrics. Suppose that we get INLINEFORM0 bilingual clause pairs after running the algorithm on the Test set, and there are INLINEFORM1 bilingual clause pairs of these INLINEFORM2 pairs are in the ground truth of the Test set, the precision score is defined as INLINEFORM3 (the algorithm gives INLINEFORM4 outputs, INLINEFORM5 of which are correct). And suppose that the ground truth of the Test set contains INLINEFORM6 bilingual clause pairs, the recall score is INLINEFORM7 (there are INLINEFORM8 ground truth samples, INLINEFORM9 of which are output by the algorithm), then the F1-score is INLINEFORM10 .
Baselines. Since the related work BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 can be seen as the ablation cases of our method (only statistical score INLINEFORM0 with dynamic programming), we compared the full proposed method with its variants on the Test set for ablation study. In addition, we also compared our method with the longest common subsequence (LCS) based approach proposed by BIBREF12 . To the best of our knowledge, BIBREF12 is the latest related work which are designed for Ancient-Modern Chinese alignment.
Hyper-parameters. For the proposed method, we estimated INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 on all aligned paragraphs. The probability Pr INLINEFORM2 n-m INLINEFORM3 of each alignment mode n-m was estimated on the Dev set. For the hyper-parameters INLINEFORM4 , INLINEFORM5 and INLINEFORM6 , the grid search was applied to tune them on the Dev set. In order to show the effect of hyper-parameters INLINEFORM7 , INLINEFORM8 , and INLINEFORM9 , we reported the results of various hyper-parameters on the Dev set in Table TABREF26 . Based on the results of grid search on the Dev set, we set INLINEFORM10 , INLINEFORM11 , and INLINEFORM12 in the following experiment. The Jieba Chinese text segmentation is employed for modern Chinese word segmentation.
Results. The results on the Test set are shown in Table TABREF28 , the abbreviation w/o means removing a particular part from the setting. From the results, we can see that the lexical matching score is the most important among these three factors, and statistical information score is more important than edit distance score. Moreover, the dictionary term in lexical matching score significantly improves the performance. From these results, we obtain the best setting that involves all these three factors. We used this setting for dataset creation. Furthermore, the proposed method performs much better than LCS BIBREF12 .
Translation Results (Q2)
In this experiment, we analyzed and compared the performance of the SMT and various NMT models on our built dataset. To verify the effectiveness of our data augmented method. We trained the NMT and SMT models on both unaugmented dataset (including 0.46M training pairs) and augmented dataset, and test all the models on the same Test set which is augmented. The models to be tested and their configurations are as follows:
SMT. The state-of-art Moses toolkit BIBREF19 was used to train SMT model. We used KenLM BIBREF20 to train a 5-gram language model, and the GIZA++ toolkit to align the data.
RNN-based NMT. The basic RNN-based NMT model is based on BIBREF0 which is introduced above. Both the encoder and decoder used 2-layer RNN with 1024 LSTM cells, and the encoder is a bi-directional RNN. The batch size, threshold of element-wise gradient clipping and initial learning rate of Adam optimizer BIBREF21 were set to 128, 5.0 and 0.001. When trained the model on augmented dataset, we used 4-layer RNN. Several techniques were investigated to train the model, including layer-normalization BIBREF22 , RNN-dropout BIBREF23 , and learning rate decay BIBREF1 . The hyper-parameters were chosen empirically and adjusted in the Dev set. Furthermore, we tested the basic NMT model with several techniques, such as target language reversal BIBREF24 (reversing the order of the words in all target sentences, but not source sentences), residual connection BIBREF25 and pre-trained word2vec BIBREF26 . For word embedding pre-training, we collected an external ancient corpus which contains INLINEFORM0 134M tokens.
Transformer-NMT. We also trained the Transformer model BIBREF4 which is a strong baseline of NMT on both augmented and unaugmented parallel corpus. The training configuration of the Transformer model is shown in Table TABREF32 . The hyper-parameters are set based on the settings in the paper BIBREF4 and the sizes of our training sets.
For the evaluation, we used the average of 1 to 4 gram BLEUs multiplied by a brevity penalty BIBREF27 which computed by multi-bleu.perl in Moses as metrics. The results are reported in Table TABREF34 . For RNN-based NMT, we can see that target language reversal, residual connection, and word2vec can further improve the performance of the basic RNN-based NMT model. However, we find that word2vec and reversal tricks seem no obvious improvement when trained the RNN-based NMT and Transformer models on augmented parallel corpus. For SMT, it performs better than NMT models when they were trained on the unaugmented dataset. Nevertheless, when trained on the augmented dataset, both the RNN-based NMT model and Transformer based NMT model outperform the SMT model. In addition, as with other translation tasks BIBREF4 , the Transformer also performs better than RNN-based NMT.
Because the Test set contains both augmented and unaugmented data, it is not surprising that the RNN-based NMT model and Transformer based NMT model trained on unaugmented data would perform poorly. In order to further verify the effect of data augmentation, we report the test results of the models on only unaugmented test data (including 48K test pairs) in Table TABREF35 . From the results, it can be seen that the data augmentation can still improve the models.
Analysis
The generated samples of various models are shown in Figure FIGREF36 . Besides BLEU scores, we analyze these examples from a human perspective and draw some conclusions. At the same time, we design different metrics and evaluate on the whole Test set to support our conclusions as follows:
On the one hand, we further compare the translation results from the perspective of people. We find that although the original meaning can be basically translated by SMT, its translation results are less smooth when compared with the other two NMT models (RNN-based NMT and Transformer). For example, the translations of SMT are usually lack of auxiliary words, conjunctions and function words, which is not consistent with human translation habits. To further confirm this conclusion, the average length of the translation results of the three models are measured (RNN-based NMT:17.12, SMT:15.50, Transformer:16.78, Reference:16.47). We can see that the average length of the SMT outputs is shortest, and the length gaps between the SMT outputs and the references are largest. Meanwhile, the average length of the sentences translated by Transformer is closest to the average length of references. These results indirectly verify our point of view, and show that the NMT models perform better than SMT in this task.
On the other hand, there still exists some problems to be solved. We observe that translating proper nouns and personal pronouns (such as names, place names and ancient-specific appellations) is very difficult for all of these models. For instance, the ancient Chinese appellation `Zhen' should be translated into `Wo' in modern Chinese. Unfortunately, we calculate the accurate rate of some special words (such as `Zhen',`Chen' and `Gua'), and find that this rate is very low (the accurate rate of translating `Zhen' are: RNN-based NMT:0.14, SMT:0.16, Transformer:0.05). We will focus on this issue in the future.
Conclusion and Future Work
We propose an effective ancient-modern Chinese clause alignment method which achieves 94.2 F1-score on Test set. Based on it, we build a large scale parallel corpus which contains INLINEFORM0 1.24M bilingual sentence pairs. To our best knowledge, this is the first large high-quality ancient-modern Chinese dataset. In addition, we test the performance of the SMT and various NMT models on our built dataset and provide a strong NMT baseline for this task which achieves 27.16 BLEU score (4-gram). We further analyze the performance of the SMT and various NMT models and summarize some specific problems that machine translation models will encounter when translating ancient Chinese.
For the future work, firstly, we are going to expand the dataset using the proposed method continually. Secondly, we will focus on solving the problem of proper noun translation and improve the translation system according to the features of ancient Chinese translation. Finally, we plan to introduce some techniques of statistical translation into neural machine translation to improve the performance.
This work is supported by National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar (Grant No. 61625204) and partially supported by the State Key Program of National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61836006 and 61432014).

Question: Where does the ancient Chinese dataset come from?
Answer: ancient Chinese history records in several dynasties (about 1000BC-200BC) and articles written by celebrities of that era
Ancient Chinese history records in several dynasties and articles written by celebrities during 1000BC-200BC collected from the internet