arXiv:2611.13636 · v1
An Interpretable Stylometric Framework for Early Chinese Buddhist Translator Styles: A Case Study on the Attribution of Disputed Works of An Shigao
摘要
Attributing early Chinese Buddhist translations requires evidence that scholars can trace back to the texts. We develop an interpretable stylometric framework that uses features defined or reviewed by Buddhist philologists, including function characters, sentence formulas, sentence-final characters, sentence length, and part-of-speech n-grams. We construct stylistic profiles from 31 authenticated translations by seven translators from the Eastern Han through the Western Jin, then compare eight disputed texts with An Shigao's profile. Two texts, T1557 and T0101, show the strongest stylistic similarity to the authenticated An Shigao corpus, with scores of 0.783 and 0.687, respectively. The attributions agree with those reported by a published BERT-based approach on the same set of disputed texts. The framework requires no task-specific training and allows scholars to inspect which linguistic features support each proposed attribution.
作者备注：Presented as a long paper at Digital Humanities 2026 (DH2026) in Daejeon, Republic of Korea. The abstract appears DH2026 Book of Abstracts, pp. 545-549, available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22656106