Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment

arXiv:2404.17337v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: All poetic forms come from somewhere. Prosodic templates can be copied for generations, altered by individuals, imported from foreign traditions, or fundamentally changed under the pressures of language evolution. Yet these relationships are notoriously difficult to trace across languages and times. This paper introduces an unsupervised method for detecting structural similarities in poems using local sequence alignment. The method relies on encoding poetic texts as strings of prosodic features using a four-letter alphabet; these sequences …

abstract alignment arxiv cs.cl evolution forms language languages paper relationships trace tracing type variation via