README.md

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license: cc0-1.0
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# AncientDoc: A Benchmark for Chinese Ancient Document Understanding

AncientDoc is the first comprehensive benchmark dataset specifically designed for **Chinese Ancient Document Understanding**. It covers multi-task evaluation ranging from **OCR** to **knowledge reasoning**, aiming to promote research on the recognition, understanding, and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large models in the scenario of ancient documents.

## Dataset Overview

- **Data Scale**: 2,973 pages
- **Number of Literatures**: Approximately 100 books
- **Types of Literatures**: 14 categories (e.g., collected works, Chu Ci-style poems, poetry and prose criticism, encyclopedic books, catalogs, etc.)
- **Time Span**: Spanning from the Warring States period to the Qing Dynasty, covering multiple important historical periods
- **Task Types**:
  1. **Page-level OCR**: Full-page text recognition (including complex scenarios such as vertical typesetting, variant characters, and annotations)
  2. **Vernacular Translation**: Intralingual translation from classical Chinese to modern Chinese
  3. **Reasoning-based QA**: Implicit reasoning QA based on the meaning of the text
  4. **Knowledge-based QA**: QA based on textual facts and background knowledge
  5. **Linguistic Variant QA**: QA related to literary genres, rhetoric, and linguistic styles

## Data Distribution

### Distribution by Dynasty
- Ming Dynasty: 1,148 pages
- Qing Dynasty: 778 pages
- Song Dynasty: 540 pages
- Tang Dynasty: 208 pages
- Han Dynasty: 110 pages
- Yuan Dynasty: 69 pages
- Southern and Northern Dynasties: 54 pages
- Jin Dynasty: 42 pages
- Warring States period: 24 pages

### Distribution by Category (Top 3 by Page Count)
1. Astronomy and Mathematics (238 pages)
2. Confucianism (232 pages)
3. Art (234 pages)

### Distribution by Script Style
- Regular script: Approximately 97%
- Cursive script: Approximately 3%

## Data Format

Data is provided in the form of **images + CSV annotations**: