Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment
arxiv(2024)
摘要
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 are then aligned to derive a distance measure based
on weighted symbol (mis)matches. Local alignment allows poems to be clustered
according to emergent properties of their underlying prosodic patterns. We
evaluate method performance on a meter recognition tasks against strong
baselines and show its potential for cross-lingual and historical research
using three short case studies: 1) mutations in quantitative meter in classical
Latin, 2) European diffusion of the Renaissance hendecasyllable, and 3)
comparative alignment of modern meters in 18–19th century Czech, German and
Russian. We release an implementation of the algorithm as a Python package with
an open license.
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