Conversational Network in the Chinese Buddhist Canon

• Authors: John Lee , Tak-sum Wong
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article describes a method to analyze characters in a literary text by considering their verbal interactions. This method exploits techniques from computational linguistics to extract all direct speech from a treebank, and to build a conversational network that visualizes the speakers, the listeners and their degree of interaction. We apply this method to create and visualize a conversational network for the Chinese Buddhist Canon. We analyze the protagonists and their interlocutors, and report statistics on their number of utterances and types of listeners, how their speech was reported, and subcommunities in the network.

Keywords

EN

treebank; direct speeech; Chinese Buddhist Canon; conversational network

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2016-02-29

accepted

2016-09-25

online

2016-10-26

Contributors

author

John Lee

• City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,

author

Tak-sum Wong

• City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2016-0022