Evaluating the Capability of ChatGPT on Ancient Chinese

ChatGPT's proficiency in handling modern standard languages suggests potential for its use in understanding ancient Chinese. This project explores ChatGPT's capabilities on ancient Chinese via two tasks: translating ancient Chinese to modern Chinese and recognizing ancient Chinese names. A comparison of ChatGPT's output with human translations serves to evaluate its comprehension of ancient Chinese. The findings indicate that: (1.)the proficiency of ancient Chinese by ChatGPT is yet to reach a satisfactory level; (2.) ChatGPT performs the best on ancient-to-modern translation when feeding with three context sentences. To help reproduce our work, we display the python code snippets used in this study.