Quantitative analysis of semantic boundaries in four ancient Chinese philosophies

Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and Mohism were four major philosophical schools during the Pre-Qin period, each forming distinct ideological systems. This study applies quantitative and visual analysis through semantic modeling to explore their core conceptual structures. A classical text corpus was constructed, and key vocabularies for each school were extracted. Word vector models established semantic spaces, followed by dimensionality reduction, clustering, and boundary detection to examine the distribution and overlap of core concepts. Results show that Daoism and Legalism are most distinct, while Confucianism and Mohism exhibit considerable semantic convergence. Transitional vocabularies reveal shared values and cross-school interactions, highlighting the complexity of intellectual boundaries. By integrating natural language processing and computational linguistics into the study of ancient Chinese thought, this research offers a novel methodological paradigm for analyzing ideological relationships and cognitive diversity in early Chinese philosophy.