AnchiBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Ancient ChineseLanguage Understanding and Generation

Abstract

Ancient Chinese is the essence of Chinese culture. There are several natural language processing tasks of ancient Chinese domain, such as ancient-modern Chinese translation, poem generation, and couplet generation. Previous studies usually use the supervised models which deeply rely on parallel data. However, it is difficult to obtain large-scale parallel data of ancient Chinese. In order to make full use of the more easily available monolingual ancient Chinese corpora, we release AnchiBERT, a pre-trained language model based on the architecture of BERT, which is trained on large-scale ancient Chinese corpora. We evaluate AnchiBERT on both language understanding and generation tasks, including poem classification, ancient-modern Chinese translation, poem generation, and couplet generation. The experimental results show that AnchiBERT outperforms BERT as well as the non-pretrained models and achieves state-of-the-art results in all cases.