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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23103/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Cleansing Jewel: A Neural Spelling Correction Model Built On Google OCR-ed Tibetan Manuscripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03427/) (2023)
- [Old Content and Modern Tools - Searching Named Entities in a Finnish OCRed Historical Newspaper Collection 1771-1910](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02839/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

I present Lepton (Letter Prediction), a fine-tuned BERT classifier that predicts whether a title in a Classical Chinese wenji table of contents is a personal letter or a closely confusable preface (particularly the farewell-preface). Lepton fine-tunes bert-base-chinese on 5438 hand-labeled wenji titles from thirty-three late-Ming and early-Qing literati. I've deployed the model on Hugging Face and has been used at the China Biographical Database (CBDB) to identify approximately fifty-five thousand letters across mid-Ming through early-Qing wenji, populating the Ming Letter Platform.