Quantitative Analysis of Style in Mihai Eminescu's Poetry (original) (raw)
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Quantitative Analysis of Poetic Texts
Quantitative Analysis of Poetic Texts, 2015
The book presents itself as a contribution to the study of language and text, with a clear emphasis on text. As is obvious from its title, it focuses exclusively on poetic texts; in particular, it analyses a corpus of 150 Romanian poems (not all of them serve as research material for all questions asked) written by Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889). In the Introduction, a short discussion on the aim and methodology of text studies is presented. With respect to the methodology, the authors explain advantages of quantitative methods. They also provide refutations of some (still relatively common) objections against the use of the mathematical modelling and statistical testing in linguistic research. There are infinitely many aspects of texts (and other objects of research as well). Even within a restricted research area there are many possible points of view, which highlight different unsolved problems, lead to different approaches, require applications of different methods, reveal new interrelations, etc. Therefore, a choice must be made what to investigate and where to start. The choice of the authors, who limit themselves to two (broadly defined) aspects of the poetic texts, is reflected in the structure of the book. It consists of four chapters; in addition to the Introduction there are Phonic phenomena, The word, and The control cycle. The second and the third chapter are divided into several sections and subsequently into subsections. The chapter on Phonic phenomena contains five sections. The first of them, Occurrence without pattern, begins with an exposition of the Romanian phonemic system. Then it deals with a phonemic transcription of Romanian written texts, where the approach from Altmann and Fengxiang (2008) is followed. Ranked frequencies of phonemes in one particular poem are modelled; not, however, in the text considered as a whole, but in each of its four strophes separately. It is shown that phoneme frequencies, and also ranks of particular phonemes, differ among individual strophes. Attention is paid also to euphony in verses, which is in this book defined as a significantly frequent (i.e. higher than random) occurrence of a phoneme in a verse. The phenomenon is
A computational analysis of poetic style
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2015
How do standards of poetic beauty change as a function of time and expertise? Here we use computational methods to compare the stylistic features of 359 English poems written by 19th century professional poets, Imagist poets, contemporary professional poets, and contemporary amateur poets. Building upon techniques designed to analyze style and sentiment in texts, we examine elements of poetic craft such as imagery, sound devices, emotive language, and diction. We find that contemporary professional poets use significantly more concrete words than 19th century poets, fewer emotional words, and more complex sound devices. These changes are consistent with the tenets of Imagism, an early 20thcentury literary movement. Further analyses show that contemporary amateur poems resemble 19th century professional poems more than contemporary professional poems on several dimensions. The stylistic similarities between contemporary amateur poems and 19th century professional poems suggest that e...
LINGUISTIC-MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS IN RECENT ROMANIAN POETRY
“Mathematics is logical enough to be able to detect the internal logics of poetry and crazy enough not to lag behind the poetic ineffable” (Solomon Marcus). The author of this article aims a statistical investigation of a recently published volume of poetry [3], which will make possible some more general conclusions on the evolution of poetry in the XXth century (either the literary current hermetism, surrealism or any other).
A Computational Analysis of Style, Affect, and Imagery in Contemporary Poetry
2012
What makes a poem beautiful? We use computational methods to compare the stylistic and content features employed by awardwinning poets and amateur poets. Building upon existing techniques designed to quantitatively analyze style and affect in texts, we examined elements of poetic craft such as diction, sound devices, emotive language, and imagery. Results showed that the most important indicator of high-quality poetry we could detect was the frequency of references to concrete objects. This result highlights the influence of Imagism in contemporary professional poetry, and suggests that concreteness may be one of the most appealing features of poetry to the modern aesthetic. We also report on other features that characterize high-quality poetry and argue that methods from computational linguistics may provide important insights into the analysis of beauty in verbal art.
Predicting and Classifying the Poetic Quality of the Early and the Late Generation of Romantics: A Computational Stylistic Study, 2023
Poetic quality is an important value for a poet’s literary craft, and it is considered as a cultural heritage of a society. Poetry is made with language and poets use language features in a particular way to create effects and to convey meaning. Measuring poetic quality would appear to be an intrinsically qualitative endeavor. However, it is possible to objectify some of the language features to some degree using a quantitative criterion, which is here proposed. The study represents a preliminary literary computational approach in relation to Romantic poetry which is dominated by a few names: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. There has been little or no research with literary computing techniques focused on measuring and classifying the quality levels of those poets’ works. The study builds on a set of ten measurable stylistic features extracted from one hundred and eight poems regardless of genre or subject. The study carries out an analysis using Binary Logistic Regression Modeling (BLRM) as one of the most commonly used predictive modeling techniques. I used the stylistic features as predictive variables and the quality as the outcome variable indicative of the stylistic characteristics of each of the poems selected. In this way, this study is able to measure the stylistic features in the selected poems and, independently, using Binary Logistic Regression to predict the general poetic quality levels for each of the poets examined. The study is also able to make connections between some of the poets which enabled a more detailed view of the subcomponents’ usage and occurrence in the poems.
Statistics and Machine Learning Experiments in English and Romanian Poetry
Sci, 2020
This paper presents a quantitative approach to poetry, based on the use of several statistical measures (entropy, informational energy, N-gram, etc.) applied to a few characteristic English writings. We found that English language changes its entropy as time passes, and that entropy depends on the language used and on the author. In order to compare two similar texts, we were able to introduce a statistical method to asses the information entropy between two texts. We also introduced a method of computing the average information conveyed by a group of letters about the next letter in the text. We found a formula for computing the Shannon language entropy and we introduced the concept of N-gram informational energy of a poetry. We also constructed a neural network, which is able to generate Byron-type poetry and to analyze the information proximity to the genuine Byron poetry.
Computational Analysis of the Historical Changes in Poetry and Prose
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 2019
The esoteric definitions of poetry are insufficient in enveloping the changes in poetry that the age of mechanical reproduction has witnessed with the widespread proliferation of the use of digital media and artificial intelligence. They are also insufficient in distinguishing between prose and poetry, as the content of both prose and poetry can be poetic. Using quotes as prose considering their poetic, context-free and celebrated nature, stylistic differences between poetry and prose are delved into. Grammar and meter are justified as distinguishing features. Datasets of popular prose and poetry spanning across 1870-1920 and 1970-2019 have been created, and multiple experiments have been conducted to prove that prose and poetry in the latter period are more alike than they were in the former. The accuracy of classification of poetry and prose of 1970-2019 is significantly lesser than that of 1870-1920, thereby proving the convergence of poetry and prose.
A Computational Approach to Poetic Structure, Rhythm and Rhyme
2014
English. In this paper we present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of English and Italian poetry. The system can work on any type of poem and produces a set of parameters that are then used to compare poems with one another, of the same author or of different authors. In this paper, we will concentrate on the second module, which is a rule-based system to represent and analyze poetic devices. Evaluation of the system on the basis of a manually created dataset including poets from Shakespeare's time down to T.S.Eliot and Sylvia Plath has shown its high precision and accuracy approximating 90%. Italiano. In questo lavoro presentiamo SPARSAR, un sistema per l'analisi automatica di poesia inglese e italiana. Il sistema e in grado di lavorare su qualunque poesia e produce un insieme di parametri che vengono poi usati per confrontare poesie e autori tra di loro. In questo lavoro ci concentreremo sul secondo modulo che consiste in un sistema a regole per rappresentare e...
USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MODERN TURKISH POETRY STUDIES
NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY XXVIII EFSS’2024 “THE CULTURAL EXPLOSION OF AI: NAVİGATING THE INTERSECTION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE FROM A SEMIOTİC AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE” 9-12 SEPTEMBER 2024, SOZOPOL BULGARIA, 2024
Literary critics search for literary works with basic criteria and terminology coming from literary theory and literary history. The aim of literary criticism is to identify texts of high literary value and those that are the opposite. Literary critics use criters from literary history and literary theory when determining the literary value of the text. This is of course valid of poetry anlysis. The value of poetic texts is determined; the obtained values were passed on to new generations for pedagogical purpuses. The most distinctive feature of a poetıc text is its style. Style is also the most important element that distinguishes one all peotic text from another poetic text. Modern poetry researchers, while examining their materials, have concentrated on the style of expression of the poetry, that is, its style. As a matter of fact, after the publication of Benedetto Croce's (1866-1952) work Aesthetic (1902), the question of what is expressioned in a literary work was abandoned in literary studies; Instead, the question of how the work is expressioned has come to the fore. The question "how" also emphasizes the individuality of the author in literary texts. New American Criticism, Czech Structuralism, Russian Formalism, Semiotic criticism, deconstruction, critical theory, etc. All twentieth-century literary criticism methods have tried to reveal the literary quality of works of high literary value. These efforts have achieved very concrete results in the process of examining poetry texts with clear scientific objectivity. For example, Greimas's (1917-1992) structural semiotic analyzes and Eco's (1932-2016) idea of limit of interpretation and his emphasis on encyclopedic capacity have enabled us to reach some meaningful results in terms of literary work studies. But recently, artificial intelligence applications such as chatgbt, cabilot, gemini and Claude have rapidly entered our daily lives. With these programs, the use of artificial intelligence in literary criticism has begun. Thus, literary criticism has moved or is about to move to a new dimension. If the idea that artificial intelligence is a digital structure is taken as basis, one of the main problematics is how a literary material, which has a predominant literary and aesthetic aspect, can be examined with artificial intelligence applications, which are a mechanical pattern. In this presentation, we will focus on the question of how three texts published in three different periods of Modern Turkish Poetry are evaluated by different artificial intelligence applications. Then, brief attention will be given to the literary and aesthetic value of these texts in the history of Turkish poetry. Finally, the results obtained with artificial intelligence will be compared with the results obtained from literary history and literary criticism. Thus, what kind of results a poetic text will or will not give us when examined with artificial intelligence applications will be analyzed comparatively