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

Abstract This study examines the potential of ChatGPT, notable for its skill in standard modern languages, in the context of ancient Chinese. We focus on two fundamental tasks: translating ancient Chinese into modern Chinese and identifying ancient Chinese names. We conduct experiments on Shi Shuo Xin Yu , which is a collection of anecdotes, short conversations, and pithy observations on personalities who lived in China between about 150 and 420 A.D. We also include other methods, like Baidu Yiyan (ERNIE-Bot) for ancient-to-modern translation, and SIKU-RoBERTa for ancient Chinese name recognition. The results reveal that ChatGPT’s performance in ancient Chinese remains in need of enhancement, but it excels in the task of ancient-to-modern translation with the provision of a few context sentences. For the ancient Chinese name recognition, ChatGPT can outperform SIKU-RoBERTa model in terms of precision, but suffers from low recall.