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Five Centuries of Monarchy in Korea: Mining the Text of the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty

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Five Centuries of Monarchy in Korea: Mining the Text of the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty Five Centuries of Monarchy in Korea: Mining the Text of the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty JinYeong Bak Alice Oh Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science KAIST KAIST Daejeon, South Korea Daejeon, South Korea [email protected] [email protected] Abstract monarchial nation in the Korean Peninsula from its founding in 1392 up to 1910. The Annals of the We present a quantitative study of the An- Joseon Dynasty are a series of books of historical nals of the Joseon Dynasty, the daily writ- facts, recorded almost daily during the Joseon dy- ten records of the five hundred years of a nasty. Whenever a king abdicated the throne, the monarchy in Korea. We first introduce the Chunchugwan (office for annals compilation) up- corpus, which is a series of books describ- dated the Annals for that king from all related offi- ing the historical facts during the Joseon cial and unofficial documents. The Annals contain dynasty. We then define three categories of political, economic, social and cultural topics dur- the monarchial ruling styles based on the ing the corresponding time periods. written records and compare the twenty- To illustrate the application of a text mining ap- five kings in the monarchy. Finally, we in- proach, we analyze each king’s ruling style from vestigate how kings show different ruling the Annals of the Joseon dynasty. Being a monar- styles for various topics within the corpus. chial system, almost all decisions within the gov- Through this study, we introduce a very ernment are confirmed by the king, where the king unique corpus of monarchial records that can make the decision on his own, or after dis- span an entire monarchy of five hundred cussing it with the government officials. We iden- years and illustrate how text mining can tify the patterns of each king’s decision making be applied to answer important historical and compare the patterns among the kings. The re- questions. sults show interesting patterns of the kings’ ruling styles, including the tendency to make arbitrary 1 Introduction decisions of the kings who were later dethroned Historical documents are usually studied qualita- because of tyranny. Additionally, we apply a topic tively by researchers focusing on a close read- model to the corpus and analyze the kings’ ruling ing of a small number of documents. However, style for each topic. for a large corpus of historical texts, qualitative methods have limitations, thus quantitative ap- proaches have been introduced recently (Moretti, 2 The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty 2005; Jockers, 2013). There is also research in ap- plying text mining and natural language process- In this section, we describe the details of The An- ing methods to identify patterns in a corpus of nals of the Joseon Dynasty (from here referred to large and longitudinal documents (Mimno, 2012). as the AJD) (Chunchugwan, 1863) and our pro- In this paper, we introduce a unique corpus of his- cess for building a corpus of the AJD. In its en- torical documents from the written records that tirety, the AJD consists of records from twenty- span almost five hundred years from the fourteenth seven kings over 519 years. However, the last two century up to the late nineteenth century within kings’ (Gojong, Sunjong) books are usually ex- the Korean peninsula. We apply text mining to this cluded from research by historians because many corpus to show the power of a computational ap- facts are distorted. We follow that convention and proach in answering historical questions. use the books of the first twenty-five kings. These We first introduce The Annals of the Joseon records, in their original Chinese text and in the Dynasty (Chunchugwan, 1863). Joseon is the last Korean translations, are available publicly through 10 Proceedings of the 9th SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities, pages 10–14, Beijing, China, July 30, 2015. c 2015 Association for Computational Linguistics and The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing T F A K B C Tag Meaning T Title M F Facts A, B, C Official’s words K King’s words M Meta information (a) Korean translation, Chinese original text and scanned image (b) Structure of the article Figure 1: Screenshot and structure of an article in the annals of the Joseon dynasty King name Period of reign # months # articles scription of the original Chinese text, the Korean Taejo 1392-1398 81 2,387 Jeongjong 1398-1400 24 624 translation, and the scanned images from the origi- Taejong 1400-1418 220 10,331 nal books. Figure 1 shows an example article3. For Sejong the Great 1418-1450 391 30,969 this paper, we analyze the Korean translated text Munjong 1450-1452 27 2,670 Danjong 1452-1455 40 2,534 (Figure 1b), though we refer to the Chinese ver- Sejo 1455-1468 165 10,832 sion to understand the meaning of some words that Yejong 1468-1469 17 1,503 Seongjong 1469-1494 311 32,443 are not currently used in the modern Korean lan- Yeonsangun 1494-1506 146 12,009 guage. Each Korean article has a title (marked T Jungjong 1506-1544 474 39,653 in the figure) that is created by the translators, the Injong 1544-1545 8 671 Myeongjong 1545-1567 272 15,044 body text (A, B, C, F and K in the figure) and the Seonjo 1567-1608 438 26,712 meta information (M) including the source, page, Gwanghaegun 1608-1623 187 22,121 and tags of the article. Injo 1623-1649 325 16,046 Hyojong 1649-1659 125 5,431 Hyeonjong 1659-1674 189 9,295 3 King’s Ruling Style Sukjong 1674-1720 568 24,209 Gyeongjong 1720-1724 54 2,744 Joseon was a monarchy, but a king could not make Yeongjo 1724-1776 639 36,731 Jeongjo 1776-1800 302 17,681 all decisions by himself. Instead, Joseon adopted a Sunjo 1800-1834 425 15,529 government system that most of the public issues Heonjong 1834-1849 182 3,986 are discussed with the government officials (Park, Cheoljong 1849-1863 180 5,771 Gojong 1863-1897 536 27,939 1983; Kim, 2008) before the king made the deci- Sunjong 1907-1910 38 4,858 sions, which are all recorded in the AJD. Hence, by analyzing the decision making process in the Table 1: Name, period of reign and the number of AJD, we can understand each king’s ruling style. months and articles for 27 kings in Joseon dynasty 3.1 Categorizing ruling style a website1. We build our corpus by crawling all In Joseon dynasty, the king was the final decision articles from that website2, and this corpus com- maker. Even when the government officials dis- prise 1,893 books and 380,271 articles covering cussed the public issues, a king’s approval was 472 years (1392 - 1863). Table 1 shows the basic needed. We can categorize each king’s decision statistics of our AJD corpus including the period making process into three types. First, a king can of reign and the number of articles for each king. order directly without discussion, which we call Each article on the website consists of the tran- Arbitrary Decision (AD). Second, a king can dis- cuss an issue with the officials and then direct his 1http://sillok.history.go.kr 2We crawl and investigate the AJD from the site legally, 3Article URL: http://sillok.history.go.kr/ because it is opened to the public by Korean government. viewer/viewtype1.jsp?id=kda_10103027_005 11 Arbitrary Decision Discussion and Order Discussion and Follow 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 Figure 2: Joseon king’s ruling styles. Each king shows quite different ruling style (p < 0.001). Decision Words last sentence in each article. Order 명X다, XPX다, 전PX다, ø, 傳õ, 下õ Approve $ÈX다, È}X다, 允 First, we identify that the setence subject is the Disapprove 불ÈX다, È}X지 JX다, 不允 king, because some issues are dealt by others. Reject 0t지 JX다, ã지 JX다, 不從, 不聽 For example, Sunjo, Heonjong and Cheoljong’s 0 0랐 從之 依啓 Follow t다, 다, , mother or grandmother ruled as regent, so her de- Table 2: Example verbs for identifying king’s de- cisions are recorded in the AJD. To identify the cision in the AJD. Words are written in Korean and part of speech in Korean, we used HanNanum Chinese alphabet. (Choi et al., 2012). And, we investigate the verbs that indicating decisions including order, follow, approval and reject. We use sixty verbs that de- order, which we call Discussion and Order (DO). scribe king’s decision specifically, and table 2 Third, a king can discuss an issue with the officials shows example words. Finally, we classify these and then decide to follow the officials’ suggestion, decisions into three types: 1) the king orders with- which we call Discussion and Follow (DF). The out discussions with the officials, and we label difference between DO and DF is that in DO, the them as AD, 2) the king orders, approves, or re- king acts aggressively with his own opinion. jects verbs in which their original Chinese char- From these observations, we ask two research acters show active decision making by the king, questions: 1) Can we identify and categorize kings and we label them as DO, and 3) the king follows with different ruling styles? 2) Do kings’ ruling or discusses verbs which show passive submission styles differ depending on the topic? by the king, and we label them as DF. To identify topics, we use a Bayesian topic 3.2 Method model, LDA (Blei et al., 2003).
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