A Fine-Tuned BERT Classifier for Personal-Letter Titles in Late-Ming and Early-Qing Collected Works

In three linesLepton, a fine-tuned BERT classifier on bert-base-chinese, predicts whether a title in a Classical Chinese wenji table of contents is a personal letter or a preface. Trained on 5438 hand-labeled titles from late-Ming and early-Qing literati, the model identified ~55,000 letters across mid-Ming to early-Qing wenji for the Ming Letter Platform.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified