Vector Based Stylistic Analysis on A ncient C hinese Books: Take the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals as an Example (2023)

Abstract: Commentary of Gongyang, Commentary of Guliang, and Commentary of Zuo are collectively called the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, which are the supplement and interpretation of the content of Spring and Autumn Annals with value in historical and literary research. In traditional research paradigms, scholars often explored the differences between the Three Commentaries within the details in contexts. Starting from the view of computational humanities, this paper examines the differences in the language style of the Three Commentaries through the representation of language, which takes the methods of deep learning. Specifically, this study vectorizes the context at word and sentence levels. It maps them into the same plane to find the differences between the use of words and sentences in the Three Commentaries. The results show that the Commentary of Gongyang and the Commentary of Guliang are relatively similar, while the Commentary of Zuo is significantly different. This paper verifies the feasibility of deep learning methods in stylistics study under computational humanities. It provides a valuable perspective for studying the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals.

## introduction style is an additional component in the process of language expression and expression. it changes due to the social era and environment in which language is used and in various forms due to the user's expression habits and intentions. this characteristic has received longstanding attention from stylistics. among the study of ancient chinese classics, the spring and autumn annals was known as "having profound meaning in simple words." and the historical records were called "li sao without rhyme." these are classic summaries of ancient chinese books. the language style can also be used to compare and analyze authors, such as li bai and du fu honored as "poetic immortal" and "poetic sage". for the study of stylistics, the traditional paradigm generally starts from vocabulary, rhetoric, sentence patterns, etc., with the help of examples, and forms an interpretive logic that is now called "close reading". corresponding to this is the "distance reading" after the rise of digital humanities. with the help of many computational methods such as lexical statistics, quantitative linguistics, and natural language processing, the study of textual style has increasingly inclined towards results with precision value. this research paradigm, or computational humanities, provides new exploration perspectives for studying stylistics. this study focuses on the style of ancient books in computational humanities. compared with traditional methods, the advantage of the computational humanities lies in quantification, which is based on data and computation to obtain objective and verifiable conclusions. the study of stylistics under this paradigm also presents a variety of technical and theoretical frameworks due to the intersection of fields, forming a developing trend of mutual integration. this study of the style of ancient books depends on multi-level observations from chinese characters to vocabulary and sentences. representation learning can also provide more comprehensive quantification for the style analysis of ancient books. this research focuses on the three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals and related ancient books. the three commentaries are the most important classics among ancient chinese books and have also received much attention in computational humanities. on the other hand, stylistic studies on the difference between the three commentaries have also gained much attention. specifically, this study will take hong ye's index on spring and autumn annals and the three commentaries as the data source and use text representation learning in deep learning to examine the style differences between the three commentaries. as an essential content of computational humanities, this study will provide a compelling computational research idea and reference for studying style in ancient books. ## related research the three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals revolve around the history of the lu state recorded in the spring and autumn period in terms of content and ideological system. still, there are apparent differences in the writing and language style focus. scholars often draw relevant conclusions based on a careful reading of the three commentaries @xcite , which have significantly contributed to the development of historiography but need more accurate, verifiable, and reproducible digital indicators to prove it. moreover, the entry point for investigation is single, often only starting from a specific problem, needing a macroscopic inspection from a global perspective. as one of the research directions of ancient chinese text mining, the metrological research of old books has the characteristics of mature technology and diverse perspectives. according to the different properties of the research objects, it can be divided into different research levels, such as vocabulary, sentences, and text. the measurement research of ancient books based on vocabulary includes word segmentation @xcite , part-of-speech tagging @xcite , named entity recognition @xcite , keyword extraction @xcite , etc. in the quantitative research conducted around the sentence level, taking sentence segmentation @xcite , sentence classification @xcite , and sentence extraction @xcite as examples, it is possible to explore the implicit features and inter-sentence relationships of sentences in ancient books. research at the chapter level includes research on automatic summarization @xcite , bibliographic information measurement @xcite , etc. in summary, studying computational humanities in ancient books has extended research in various directions at different levels and has gradually formed a mature research paradigm. however, there is still a gap in the study of the style and style of ancient books, and there needs to be more research that takes ancient books as the main body and uses quantitative analysis to observe the differences in digital indicators of ancient books. this study takes the three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals as the research object. it aims at texts of different levels to explore the language style differences formed in writing the three biographies. this is significant for exploring ancient books in the spring and autumn periods. ## style comparison with text representation words and sentences are important objects in stylistics research; different from the measurement of word frequency in traditional diagrams, this study uses representation learning models in deep learning to automatically obtain the vectorized representation of words and sentences to acquire knowledge about vocabulary and sentence style. specifically, word2vec and sentence-bert were chosen respectively for vectorizing words and sentences in the three commentaries, and mapping scatter points with dimensionality reduction was used for the style comparison. ## conclusion from the perspective of natural language processing, uses a deep learning model with good versatility to calculate the language style differences between different levels of the three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals. it concludes that the commentary of zuo differs from the commentary of gongyang, and the commentary of guliang, realizing the mining research on the language characteristics of ancient books. in the follow-up research, we will use other methods to examine the differences between the three commentaries. from the perspective of natural language processing, this study has verified the feasibility of the general language model in discovering the differences in the three commentaries, and subsequent language models suitable for ancient chinese, such as guwenbert, sikubert, and other pre-training based on ancient chinese domain data enhancement model to further observe differences in language styles. in addition, the dif-ference between the three commentaries can be observed from multiple perspectives, such as automatically mining different types of entities, or observing the usage habits of words from the part of speech. from the perspective of quantitative linguistics, the language style differences between the three commentaries will be observed through different levels of language measurement indicators. at the word level, the index selects the average word length to measure the difference in word length, selects the word density, standard type ratio, and single word ratio to measure the difference in the richness of the three commentaries vocabulary, and observes the information carrying capacity of the richness of the three commentaries by calculating the entropy of text information. at the sentence level, the writing characteristics of the three commentaries were examined through average sentence length, sentence dispersion, sentence fragmentation, and other indicators. from the above two perspectives, the linguistic characteristics and stylistic differences of the three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals can be examined from a new perspective, which provides new verification ideas for the research related to three commentaries on the spring and autumn annals.