Style Detection for Free Verse Poetry from Text and Speech

Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek


Abstract
Modern and post-modern free verse poems feature a large and complex variety in their poetic prosodies that falls along a continuum from a more fluent to a more disfluent and choppy style. As the poets of modernism overcame rhyme and meter, they oriented themselves in these two opposing directions, creating a free verse spectrum that calls for new analyses of prosodic forms. We present a method, grounded in philological analysis and current research on cognitive (dis)fluency, for automatically analyzing this spectrum. We define and relate six classes of poetic styles (ranging from parlando to lettristic decomposition) by their gradual differentiation. Based on this discussion, we present a model for automatic prosodic classification of spoken free verse poetry that uses deep hierarchical attention networks to integrate the source text and audio and predict the assigned class. We evaluate our model on a large corpus of German author-read post-modern poetry and find that classes can reliably be differentiated, reaching a weighted f-measure of 0.73, when combining textual and phonetic evidence. In our further analyses, we validate the model’s decision-making process, the philologically hypothesized continuum of fluency and investigate the relative importance of various features.
Anthology ID:
C18-1164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1929–1940
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1164
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein, and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek. 2018. Style Detection for Free Verse Poetry from Text and Speech. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1929–1940, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Style Detection for Free Verse Poetry from Text and Speech (Baumann et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1164.pdf
Code
 timobaumann/deeplyrik