Papers › Shuo Wen Jie Zi: Rethinking Dictionaries and Glyphs for Chinese Language Pre-training

Shuo Wen Jie Zi: Rethinking Dictionaries and Glyphs for Chinese Language Pre-training

30 May 2023arXiv:2305.18760archive 2025-07-28

Yuxuan Wang, Jianghui Wang, Dongyan Zhao, Zilong Zheng

We introduce CDBERT, a new learning paradigm that enhances the semantics understanding ability of the Chinese PLMs with dictionary knowledge and structure of Chinese characters. We name the two core modules of CDBERT as Shuowen and Jiezi, where Shuowen refers to the process of retrieving the most appropriate meaning from Chinese dictionaries and Jiezi refers to the process of enhancing characters' glyph representations with structure understanding. To facilitate dictionary understanding, we propose three pre-training tasks, i.e., Masked Entry Modeling, Contrastive Learning for Synonym and Antonym, and Example Learning. We evaluate our method on both modern Chinese understanding benchmark CLUE and ancient Chinese benchmark CCLUE. Moreover, we propose a new polysemy discrimination task PolyMRC based on the collected dictionary of ancient Chinese. Our paradigm demonstrates consistent improvements on previous Chinese PLMs across all tasks. Moreover, our approach yields significant boosting on few-shot setting of ancient Chinese understanding.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

patrick-tssn/cdbert officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Contrastive Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Contrastive Learning

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections