AI project developed to identify ancient Chinese books overseas

China's AI technology companies are rising stars -- here people have their faces scanned at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Photo by the Bangkok Post. Sketched by the Pan Pacific Agency.

CHENGDU, May 24, 2021, Xinhua. An artificial intelligence (AI) project has been developed to help identify ancient Chinese books overseas. The project, with an accuracy rate of 97.5 percent, has identified 200,000 pages of ancient Chinese books, covering 30,000 characters, Xinhua reported.

It took Sichuan University, University of California, Berkeley and Alibaba’s DAMO Academy more than two years to complete the project.

“The accuracy rate was about 40 percent at the beginning. We have more than 30 students to manually identify the characters that were not recognized or wrongly identified by AI to help improve its accuracy,” said Wang Guo, deputy dean of the School of History and Culture, Sichuan University.

The digital versions of the identified ancient Chinese books have been placed online and are open to the public.

Efforts will continue to identify more ancient Chinese books overseas.

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