Transformers analyzing poetry: multilingual metrical pattern prediction with transfomer-based language models

The splitting of words into stressed and unstressed syllables is the foundation for the scansion of poetry, a process that aims at determining the metrical pattern of a line of verse within a poem. Intricate language rules and their exceptions, as well as poetic licenses exerted by the authors, make...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rosa, Javier de la, Pérez Pozo, Álvaro, Sisto, Mirella De, Hernández Lorenzo, Laura, Díaz Paredes, Aitor, Ros Muñoz, Salvador, González-Blanco García, Elena
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Repositorio:e-spacio. Repositorio Institucional de la UNED
Idioma:español
OAI Identifier:oai:e-spacio.uned.es:20.500.14468/23168
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/23168
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:57 Lingüística::5701 Lingüística aplicada::5701.07 Lengua y literatura
55 Historia::5505 Ciencias auxiliares de la historia::5505.10 Filología
Natural language processing
Language models
Digital humanities
Poetry
Descripción
Sumario:The splitting of words into stressed and unstressed syllables is the foundation for the scansion of poetry, a process that aims at determining the metrical pattern of a line of verse within a poem. Intricate language rules and their exceptions, as well as poetic licenses exerted by the authors, make calculating these patterns a nontrivial task. Some rhetorical devices shrink the metrical length, while others might extend it. This opens the door for interpretation and further complicates the creation of automated scansion algorithms useful for automatically analyzing corpora on a distant reading fashion. In this paper, we compare the automated metrical pattern identification systems available for Spanish, English, and German, against fine-tuned monolingual and multilingual language models trained on the same task. Despite being initially conceived as models suitable for semantic tasks, our results suggest that transformers-based models retain enough structural information to perform reasonably well for Spanish on a monolingual setting, and outperforms both for English and German when using a model trained on the three languages, showing evidence of the benefits of cross-lingual transfer between the languages.