On the Development of Interlinearized Ancient Literature of Ethnic Minorities: A Case Study of the Interlinearization of Ancient Written T ibetan Literature (2023)

Abstract: Ancient ethnic documents are essential to China’s ancient literature and an indispensable civilizational achievement of Chinese culture. However, few research teams are involved due to language and script literacy limitations. To address these issues, this paper proposes an interlinearized annotation strategy for ancient ethnic literature. This strategy aims to alleviate text literacy difficulties, encourage interdisciplinary researchers to participate in studying ancient ethnic literature, and improve the efficiency of ancient ethnic literature development. Concretely, the interlinearized annotation consists of original, word segmentation, Latin, annotated, and translation lines. In this paper, we take ancient Tibetan literature as an example to explore the interlinearized annotation strategy. However, manually building large-scale corpus is challenging. To build a large-scale interlinearized dataset, we propose a multi-task learning-based interlinearized annotation method, which can generate interlinearized annotation lines based on the original line. Experimental results show that after training on about 10,000 sentences (lines) of data, our model achieves 70.9% and 63.2% F1 values on the segmentation lines and annotated lines, respectively, and 18.7% BLEU on the translation lines. It dramatically enhances the efficiency of data annotation, effectively speeds up interlinearized annotation, and reduces the workload of manual annotation.

## introduction the excellent traditional culture of ethnicity is an essential part of chinese culture, an important cultural heritage of the chinese nation, and a valuable asset to human civilization. many excellent traditional cultures have been recorded in ancient ethnic literature @xcite , some of which record the process of creating the great history of the chinese nation together and the vivid facts of exchanges and interactions among various ethnic groups. they contain rich national unity and progress ideas and are necessary historical resources for witnessing the community of the chinese nation @xcite . therefore, the indepth excavation of ancient ethnic literature is conducive to promoting traditional chinese culture and showing the historical events of the formation of sense of community for the chinese nation @xcite . china is rich in ancient ethnic literature, but studying ancient ethnic literature faces many difficulties. first, the degree of digitization is relatively low due to the lack of public resources; second, limited by language and script literacy, the group of ancient ethnic literature research and utilization is small. in exploring the formation of chinese civilization and promoting chinese culture, how more disciplines and researchers pay attention to, study, develop, utilize, and popularize the excellent traditional culture contained in ancient ethnic books is an issue worth exploring. the general office of the cpc central committee and the general office of the state council issued the opinions on promoting the work of ancient books in the new era, emphasizing the need to encourage interdisciplinary research methods. the 'text structuring', 'knowledge systemization' and 'intelligent utilization' of ancient books are actively carried out @xcite . the documentary properties and unique cultural attributes of minority antiquarian literature have made it a focus of interdisciplinary experts and a laboratory for interdisciplinary research @xcite . however, constructing most ancient ethnic literature re-sources is still difficult to meet the needs of multiple disciplines. for example, experts in computational linguistics focus on the information processing of ancient ethnic documents and need a cooked corpus with information on word segmentation, annotation, entity recognition, and translation, and then carry out deep text mining. experts in the field of library intelligence explore the collection, collation, cataloging, and citation of multi-language ethnic ancient texts from the perspective of knowledge organization and knowledge management of ancient texts, and build catalog search libraries and full-text search libraries to serve readers better. linguistics researchers are concerned about the phonology, vocabulary, and grammar of the national languages in the multi-language ancient ethnic document to assist in the construction of the ancient chinese phonetic system, analysis and comparison of the chinese and the people's language relations, to explore the language homology differentiation clues, summarize the phonetic, lexical and grammatical type characteristics and the evolutionary path of the language. researchers in history focus on historical elements such as time, place, people, and events in the ancient texts of multi-language ethnic groups and explore the political systems, economic systems, social histories, and foreign exchanges of different ethnic groups. scholars in ethnic culture explore the traditional culture, folk customs, cultural heritage, and traditional handicrafts recorded in the ancient texts of multilingual ethnic groups. experts in religion, philosophy, art, and traditional medicine also hope to obtain the knowledge they need from multilingual ethnic literature. to better meet the needs of multidisciplinary utilization of ancient ethnic texts, this paper proposes a strategy of interlinearized annotation of ethnic ancient texts, converting the content of ethnic ancient texts into five lines of data, namely, the original line (original line), the line of folk language sub-word (segmentation line), the line of latin alphabet transcription (transcription line), the line of grammar annotation (annotation line) and the line of chinese meaning translation (translation line). researchers from different disciplines can use these annotations to analyze and study the lit-erature content. in conducting interlinearized annotation research, manual annotation was mainly used in the early stage. with the accumulation of annotation data, this paper proposes a multi-tasking framework based on deep learning to automatically generate interlinearized annotation data to assist manual annotation and finally build a large-scale textual structured database of ancient ethnic literature to lay the data foundation for further development and utilization of ancient ethnic documents in multiple disciplines. ## related work china is a multi-ethnic country, and in the long history of the formation and development of the chinese nation, people of all ethnic groups have shared honor and disgrace and are closely related to each other, creating chinese civilization and culture together. the multilingual chapter-aligned, sentence-aligned, and word-aligned historical documents handed down or excavated archaeologically are the best proof of the exchange and intermingling of people from all ethnic groups. among the chinese and tibetan bilingual aligned historical documents, chapter-aligned documents are the most numerous, followed by sentence-aligned and less word-aligned documents. chapter-aligned documents are both translated from chinese into ethnic texts, such as the four ancient tibetan translations of the shang shu zhou shu @xcite in the first collection of the 1978 paris photocopy of the selected tibetan documents of the bibliothèque nationale de french; there are also translations from ethnic texts into chinese, such as the oath on the west side of the tang-fan alliance monument, which is a chinese-tibetan aligned sentence pair @xcite . most of the materials in the form of word control are found in the dictionary category and word list categories, such as the great collection of translation nominalities (z, 2013), the dunhuang tibetan texts p.t. 1257 and p.t. 1261 (x, 2014), and the imperial five-style qing wenjian @xcite . however, there are not many materials on the full-text word alignment of ancient literature texts. scholars of linguistics who study ancient ethnic literature often have to translate the documents. in general, the source and translated texts are still aligned in terms of chapter alignment, such as the translation of baxie (supplementary text) (ba s n, 1990), the chinese translation of the history of buddhism in buton @xcite , and the tibetan king's tale (suo n j z, 2002), among others. however, some scholars have also adopted the wordalignment model, such as the study of tibetan fatwas in the 8th-9th centuries (z, 2007), etc. linguistic researchers have been more rigorous in organizing documentary materials, especially in dialectal and ethnolinguistic materials, and have mostly adopted the word alignment model. this paradigm is used for language text materials in the chinese ethnolinguistic compendium series, the newly discovered languages of china series, and the endangered languages of china series. for example, an example of the annotated text for the language of the security language on page 1918 of languages of china. the german publishing house lincom gmbh has been funding the publication of interlinearly annotated corpora and scholarly works in minor languages worldwide for many years. tikaram poudel published rajbanshi grammar and interlinearized text (an indo-aryan language of nepal and bengal) in 2006 @xcite ; karnakhar khatiwada published a reference grammar in 2017 of @xcite describing writings and text annotation interlinearized texts in dhimal with grammar notes @xcite (interlinearized annotated texts in dhimal). to date, the publisher has published more than 500 works in small languages. sino-tibetan linguists randy j. lapolla & dory poa also published rawang texts grammatically annotated texts at lincom europa @xcite . computer experts have developed interlinearized annotation tools to assist linguists in advancing interlinearized annotation successfully. the american standard interchange language (sil) organization has developed toolbox foot_0 annotation tool; british scholars have developed eudico linguistic annotator ( elan) annotation tool foot_1 , and french scholars adopted the interlinear text editor software (ite) technology. chinese scholars have used toolbox tool to organize and publish the series 'grammatical annotated texts of chinese ethnic languages' (d, 2016), which is a total of 20 books covering 20 languages or dialects of five principal language families or groups in china, namely tibetan-burmese, miao-yao, dong-tai, south asian and altaic, with a total word count of about 10 million words. these software tools are widely used in the linguistic community, making it easier and faster for linguists to annotate the corpus and enhancing the standardization of corpus annotation. however, the common drawback is that they mainly rely on manual operations and fail to introduce natural language processing techniques for low-resource languages, especially natural language information techniques. interlinearized annotation is similar to the goal of word alignment in machine translation, where the word alignment technique is to obtain word boundaries in sentence pairs and achieve translation alignment based on bilingual pairs, which is a core task in machine translation @xcite . however, the research results devoted to word alignment methods belong to the early stage of statistical machine translation. with the development of ethnolinguistic information processing and the promotion of the 'one belt, one road' strategy, machine translation of low-resource languages has become a popular research topic @xcite , and some research results discussing the word alignment between chinese and mandarin have appeared. for example, zhao yang and zhou long discussed the min-chinese scarce resource neural machine translation technique @xcite ; (su l y, 2018) discussed the word alignment method in mongolian-chinese machine translation; @xcite . studied the han-vi word alignment. however, the current machine translation commonly adopts deep neural network technology, which does not need to discuss word alignment methods separately. in recent years, the concepts of 'exploring the origin of chinese civilization' and 'forging a sense of chinese national community' have been proposed, and interdisciplinary fields have jointly focused on transcribed texts of ethnic minority oral discourse and ancient ethnic literature. the increasing demand for interlinearized annotation of ethnic texts has made interlinearized annotation a research paradigm. however, it is challenging to meet the needs of multidisciplinary and multilingual interlinearized annotated corpus by manual annotation. this paper combines the linguistic fine-grained annotation paradigm and multi-tasking techniques to conduct automatic interlinearized annotation. ## human-computer interaction interlinearized annotation platform corpus annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive; however, annotated corpora can provide essential resources for ancient literature research and are indispensable. with enough training corpus, nlp algorithms can assist corpus annotation, such as ner, relation extraction, text classification, and machine translation. the corpus annotation is also a common task in nlp. the interlinearized annotation of ancient ethnic literature is a pioneering work, and by manually annotating a certain scale of training data, the nlp algorithms can assist in data annotation. to advance the research in this paper, we have developed a semi-automated interlinearized annotation platform. the interlinearized annotation platform mainly has the following modules. ## conclusion in this paper, we discuss the idea and vision of interlinearized annotation of ancient ethnic literature from the perspective of data resource normalization and sharing. taking ancient tibetan literature as an example, we propose accumulating corpus based on manual interlinearized annotation and then using machine learning to conduct automatic annotation. this research provides a new research paradigm for developing and utilizing ancient ethnic literature in china, especially the structured data of interlinearized annotation, which lays a good foundation for ancient literature development and utilization. in the future, we plan to construct ancient language knowledge based on an interlinearized annotation dataset.