An artificial intelligence (AI) project has been developed to help identify ancient Chinese books overseas.

The project, which currently has an accuracy rate of 97.5 percent, has identified 200,000 pages of ancient Chinese books, covering 30,000 characters.

It took Sichuan University, University of California, Berkeley and Alibaba's DAMO Academy more than two years to complete the project.

"The accuracy rate was about 40 percent at the beginning. We have more than 30 students to manually identify the characters that were not recognized or wrongly identified by AI to help improve its accuracy," explained Wang Guo, deputy dean of the School of History and Culture, Sichuan University.

The digital versions of the identified ancient Chinese books have been placed online, where they can be accessed by the public for free.

Efforts will continue to identify more ancient Chinese books overseas.

Xinhua