Enjambment Detection in a Large Diachronic Corpus of Spanish Sonnets

Abstract

Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry, giving rise to different stylistic effects. In Spanish literary studies, there are unclear points about the types of stylistic effects that can arise, and under which linguistic conditions. To systematically gather evidence about this, we developed a system to automatically identify enjambment (and its type) in Spanish. For evaluation, we manually annotated a reference corpus covering different periods. As a scholarly corpus to apply the tool, from public HTML sources we created a diachronic corpus covering four centuries of sonnets (3750 poems), and we analyzed the occurrence of enjambment across stanzaic boundaries in different periods. Besides, we found examples that highlight limitations in current definitions of enjambment.

The Linguistic Structure of Haiku/Senryu and Its Evolution Over Time

“…Metaphor is of course used in many forms of poetry, and rule-based and statistical models have enabled the classification of metaphor in a corpus of English language poems (Kesarwani, Inkpen, Szpakowicz and Tanasecu (2017). Other models have enabled the detection of metaphor in expressionistic German poems (Reinig & Rehbein, 2019), identification of features that the predict period of origin, authorship, and goodness ratings (Jacobs & Kinder, 2017), and the differentiation of metaphor created by renowned poets and non-professional authors (Jacobs & Kinder, 2018). Additional examples of CL methods that have been used to study poetry include the detection of emotion in Punjabi poetry using Naive Bayesian and Support Vector Machine techniques (Saini & Kaur, 2020), stanza identification in Hindi poetry (Audichya & Saini, 2021), probabilistic topic modeling to study topic, meter, and authorship in Persian poems (Asgari & Chappelier, 2013), statistical and rule-based methods to determine the metrical and semantic aspects of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish Golden Age sonnets (Navarro-Colorado, 2015), and enjambment detection in a large diachronic corpus of Spanish sonnets (Ruiz, Canton, Poibeau & Gonzalez-Blanco, 2017).…”

End-to-end style-conditioned poetry generation: What does it take to learn from examples alone?

“…Poetry analysis. Computational analysis of poetry has been concerned largely with formal features such as metre (Greene et al, 2010;Agirrezabal et al, 2016;Estes and Hench, 2016), rhyme (Reddy and Knight, 2011;Haider and Kuhn, 2018), and enjambment (Ruiz et al, 2017;Baumann et al, 2018). More recently, higher-level phenomena, including semantic coherence (Herbelot, 2015), metaphor (Reinig and Rehbein, 2019;Kesarwani et al, 2017), and diachronic analysis of tropes (Haider and Eger, 2019) have come into focus.…”

PO-EMO: Conceptualization, Annotation, and Modeling of Aesthetic Emotions in German and English Poetry

“…Natural language understanding research on poetry has investigated stylistic variation (Kaplan and Blei, 2007;Kao and Jurafsky, 2015;Voigt and Jurafsky, 2013), with a focus on broadly accepted formal features such as meter (Greene et al, 2010;Agirrezabal et al, 2016;Estes and Hench, 2016) and rhyme (Reddy and Knight, 2011;Haider and Kuhn, 2018), as well as enjambement (Ruiz et al, 2017;Baumann et al, 2018) and metaphor (Kesarwani et al, 2017;Reinig and Rehbein, 2019). Recent work has also explored the relationship of poetry and prose, mainly on a syntactic level feelings of Beauty and Sublime have therefore come to be subsumed under the rubrique of aesthetic emotions in recent psychological research (Menninghaus et al, 2019).…”