WikiHan: A New Comparative Dataset for Chinese Languages

Code

• github.com/cmu-llab/wikihan
  OfficialIn papernone★ 14
• github.com/cmu-llab/meloni-2021-reimplementation
  OfficialIn paperpytorch★ 5

Abstract

Most comparative datasets of Chinese varieties are not digital; however, Wiktionary includes a wealth of transcriptions of words from these varieties. The usefulness of these data is limited by the fact that they use a wide range of variety-specific romanizations, making data difficult to compare. The current work collects this data into a single constituent (IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet) and structured form (TSV) for use in comparative linguistics and Chinese NLP. At the time of writing, the dataset contains 67,943 entries across 8 varieties and Middle Chinese. The dataset is validated on a protoform reconstruction task using an encoder-decoder cross-attention architecture (Meloni et al 2021), achieving an accuracy of 54.11%, a PER (phoneme error rate) of 17.69%, and a FER (feature error rate) of 6.60%.

Tasks

Reproductions