Poetic Prosodies

In this project, we analyze the literary prosodic properties of post-modern poetry. More concretely, we analyzed author-spoken poems from lyrikline.org and classified different types of post-modern poetry. Through these classifications, we were able to prove a hypothesized fluency/disfluency-continuum which can be used to analyze post-modern poetic styles.

In the project, we aligned poetic speech to the corresponding text (using our robust alignment tool previously developed for the SWC) and jointly analyzed these using hierarchical attention networks. We exploited the line-by-line structure of poems by pre-training first the lower and then the upper layer of the HAN to deal with the relatively extreme data sparsity (just a few hundred poems annotated, a few thousand in total). We also find patterns in the model's attention that appear to be meaningful, as shown in the figure above.

See also the project webpage.

Funding

This project is funded through a 3-year grant by Volkswagenstiftung in the highly competitive program Mixed methods in the humanities which I jointly acquired and lead with B. Meyer-Sickendiek at FU Berlin (2017-2020).

Collaborators on this project

• Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (Co-PI)
• Hussein Hussein (PostDoc)
• Jasper Elbeshausen (research student)

Related Publications:

• Timo Baumann and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (2016).
  "Large-scale Analysis of Spoken Free-verse Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH). Osaka, Japan.
  URN, pdf, poster, bibtex
• Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (2018).
  "Style Detection for Free Verse Poetry from Text and Speech".
  in: Proceedings of COLING. Santa Fe, USA, pages 1929-1940.
  URN, URL, pdf, poster, bibtex
• Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (2018).
  "Analysis of Rhythmic Phrasing: Feature Engineering vs. Representation Learning for Classifying Readout Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of the Joint LaTeCH&CLfL Workshop. Santa Fe, USA, pages 44-49.
  URN, URL, pdf, slides, bibtex
• Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (2018).
  "Analysing the Focus of a Hierarchical Attention Network: The Importance of Enjambments When Classifying Post-modern Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Interspeech. Hyderabad, India, pages 2162-2166.
  DOI, pdf, poster, bibtex
• Timo Baumann, Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Jasper Elbeshausen (2019).
  "A Tool for Human-in-the-Loop Analysis and Exploration of (not only) Prosodic Classifications for Post-modern Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of INF-DH. Kassel, Germany. Gesellschaft für Informatik, pages 151-156.
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Timo Baumann and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (2020).
  "Deep Learning meets Post-modern Poetry".
  in: Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries: TwinTalks Workshop. Riga, Latvia, pages 30-36.
  URN, pdf, bibtex
• Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Timo Baumann (2020).
  "Free Verse and Beyond: How to Classify Post-modern Spoken Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Tokyo, Japan, pages 690-694.
  DOI, bibtex
• Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Timo Baumann and Hussein Hussein (2020).
  "Requirements on the Punctuation Reconstruction for the Translation of Post-modern Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Digital Humanities Deutschland 2020 (DHd 2020). Paderborn, Germany.
  DOI, bibtex
• Timo Baumann, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Hussein Hussein (2020).
  "How to Identify Speech When Translating Unpunctuated Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung (ESSV). Magdeburg, Germany, pages 165-172.
  URN, URL, pdf, bibtex
• Meyer-Sickendiek, Burkhard, Hussein, Hussein and Baumann, Timo (2019).
  "From Fluency To Disfluency: Ranking Prosodic Features Of Poetry By Using Neural Networks".
  in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Humanities (DH 2019). Utrecht, Netherlands. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Timo Baumann (2019).
  "How to identify elliptical poems within a digital corpus of auditory poetry".
  in: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung (ESSV). Dresden, Germany. (Peter Birkholz and Simon Stone, Eds.) TUDpress, Dresden, pages 247-254.
  URN, URL, pdf, bibtex
• Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Timo Baumann (2019).
  "Identification of Concrete Poetry within a Modern-Poetry Corpus using Neural Networks".
  in: Proceedings of the Quantitative Approaches to Versification Conference. Prague, Czech Republic.
  URL, pdf, bibtex
• Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein and Timo Baumann (2017).
  "Rhythmicalizer: Data Analysis for the Identification of Rhythmic Patterns in Readout Poetry".
  in: INFORMATIK 2017. (Maximilian Eibl and Martin Gaedke, Eds.) Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn, pages 2189-2200.
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein and Timo Baumann (2018).
  "Analysis and Classification of Prosodic Styles in Post-modern Spoken Poetry".
  in: INF-DH 2018 Workshopband. Berlin, Germany. (Manuel Burghardt and Claudia Müller-Birn, Eds.).
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Timo Baumann (2018).
  "Tonality in Language: The "Generative Theory of Tonal Music" as a Framework for Prosodic Analysis of Poetry".
  in: 6th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (TAL). Berlin, Germany, pages 178-182.
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Hussein Hussein, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Timo Baumann (2018).
  "Automatic Detection of Enjambment in German Readout Poetry".
  in: Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Poznán, Poland.
  DOI, pdf, bibtex
• Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein and Timo Baumann (2018).
  "Recognizing Modern Sound Poetry with LSTM Networks".
  in: Proceedings of Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung (ESSV). Ulm, Germany. (André Berton, Udo Haiber and Wolfgang Minker, Eds.) TUDpress, pages 192-199.
  URN, URL, pdf, bibtex

Project