Graphilosophy: Graph-Based Digital Humanities Computing with The Four Books
2026-03-30 • Computers and Society
Computers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created Graphilosophy, a special AI tool that helps people understand The Four Books, important East Asian philosophical texts, by connecting ideas across Chinese and Vietnamese languages. This tool uses language processing and knowledge graphs to show relationships between concepts while keeping the different interpretations intact. It makes it easier for non-experts to explore these ancient ethical ideas and see how they changed across cultures. Their early testing shows it helps people learn better about these philosophies and supports cross-cultural understanding.
The Four Booksontologyknowledge graphnatural language processingmultilingual embeddingscross-lingual retrievalinterpretive pluralityethical conceptsbilingual corpusAI-assisted reasoning
Authors
Minh-Thu Do, Quynh-Chau Le-Tran, Duc-Duy Nguyen-Mai, Thien-Trang Nguyen, Khanh-Duy Le, Minh-Triet Tran, Tam V. Nguyen, Trung-Nghia Le
Abstract
The Four Books have shaped East Asian intellectual traditions, yet their multi-layered interpretive complexity limits their accessibility in the digital age. While traditional bilingual commentaries provide a vital pedagogical bridge, computational frameworks are needed to preserve and explore this wisdom. This paper bridges AI and classical philosophy by introducing Graphilosophy, an ontology-guided, multi-layered knowledge graph framework for modeling and interpreting The Four Books. Integrating natural language processing, multilingual semantic embeddings, and humanistic analysis, the framework transforms a bilingual Chinese-Vietnamese corpus into an interpretively grounded resource. Graphilosophy encodes linguistic, conceptual, and interpretive relationships across interconnected layers, enabling cross-lingual retrieval and AI-assisted reasoning while explicitly preserving scholarly nuance and interpretive plurality. The system also enables non-expert users to trace the evolution of ethical concepts across borders and languages, ensuring that ancient wisdom remains a living resource for modern moral discourse rather than a static relic of the past. Through an interactive interface, users can trace the evolution of ethical concepts across languages, ensuring ancient wisdom remains relevant for modern discourse. A preliminary user study suggests the system's capacity to enhance conceptual understanding and cross-cultural learning. By linking algorithmic representation with ethical inquiry, this research exemplifies how AI can serve as a methodological bridge, accommodating the ambiguity of cultural heritage rather than reducing it to static data. The Source code and data are released at https://github.com/ThuDoMinh1102/confucian-texts-knowledge-graph.