Exploring the Capabilities of ChatGPT in Ancient Chinese Translation and Person Name Recognition

TL;DR

This study evaluates ChatGPT's ability to translate and recognize ancient Chinese, finding it performs best with contextual sentences but still needs improvement for satisfactory comprehension.

Contribution

It systematically assesses ChatGPT's ancient Chinese translation and recognition capabilities, providing insights and reproducible code for future research.

Findings

ChatGPT's proficiency in ancient Chinese is currently limited.

Performance improves with three context sentences in translation.

Reproducible Python code is provided for further studies.

Abstract

ChatGPT's proficiency in handling modern standard languages suggests potential for its use in understanding ancient Chinese. This paper explores ChatGPT's capabilities on ancient Chinese via two tasks: translating ancient Chinese to modern Chinese and recognizing ancient Chinese names. A comparison of ChatGPT's output with human translations serves to evaluate its comprehension of ancient Chinese. The findings indicate that: (1.)the proficiency of ancient Chinese by ChatGPT is yet to reach a satisfactory level; (2.) ChatGPT performs the best on ancient-to-modern translation when feeding with three context sentences. To help reproduce our work, we display the python code snippets used in this study.