Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry

Hench, Christopher

doi:10.18653/v1/w17-2207

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…§31 As Bouma and Hermans 2012 syllabifying Middle Dutch words can be of interest to the literary scholar. As shown by Hench (2017) for Middle High German, syllabification is essential for gaining insight in the soundscapes of medieval poetry. Finally, syllabification is an essential stepping stone in metrical studies.…”

Section: Model Criticism §29mentioning

confidence: 99%

Data-Driven Syllabification for Middle Dutch

Haverals

Karsdorp

Kestemont

2019

Digital Medievalist

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Section: Model Criticism §29mentioning

confidence: 99%

Data-Driven Syllabification for Middle Dutch

Haverals

Karsdorp

Kestemont

2019

Digital Medievalist

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“…As a baseline, we implement rather straightforward style features, such as line length, poem length (in token, syllables, lines), cadence (number of syllables of last word in line), soundscape (ratio of closed to open syllables, see (Hench, 2017)), and a proxy for metre, the number of syllables of the first word in the line.…”

Section: Classification Of Time Periods and Authorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diachronic Topics in New High German Poetry

Haider¹

2019

Preprint

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Statistical topic models are increasingly and popularly used by Digital Humanities scholars to perform distant reading tasks on literary data (Navarro-Colorado, 2018), (Hettinger et al., 2016. It allows us to estimate what people talk about. Especially Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), see (Blei et al., 2003), has shown its usefulness, as it is unsupervised, robust, easy to use, scalable, and it offers interpretable results. In a preliminary study, we apply LDA to a corpus of New High German poetry (textgrid, with 51k poems, 8m token) and interpret salient topics, their trend over time (1575-1925 A.D.), and use the distribution of topics over documents for a classification of poems into time periods and for authorship attribution. ExperimentsWe approach diachronic variation of poetry from two perspectives. First, as distant reading task to visualize the development of clearly interpretable topics

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“…36 Syllabification was performed following the method introduced in Hench (2017), which established an accuracy of 99.4% on MHG. 37 For the presented model, the accuracy will be highest if the text is standardized and includes markers of long vowels because the annotated texts were such, and the extracted features depend upon this.…”

Section: Workflowmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Metrical Analysis of Medieval German Poetry Using Supervised Learning

Hench

Estes

2018

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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Middle High German (MHG) epic poetry presents a unique solution to the linguistic changes underpinning the transition from classical Latin poetry, based on syllable length, into later vernacular rhythmic poetry, based on phonological stress. The predominating pattern in MHG verse is the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, but syllable length also plays a crucial role. There are a total of eight possible metrical values. Single or half mora syllables can carry any one of three types of stress, resulting in six combinations. The seventh value is a double mora, i.e., a long stressed syllable. The eighth value is an elided syllable. We construct a supervised Conditional Random Field (CRF) model to predict the metrical value of syllables, and subsequently investigate medieval German poets' use of semantic and sonorous emphasis through meter. The features used are: (1) the syllable's position within the line, (2) the syllable's length in characters, (3) the syllable's characters, (4) elision (last two characters of previous syllable and first two characters of focal syllable), (5) syllable weight, and (6) word boundaries. Additional metrical rules are enforced and marginal probabilities are calculated to yield the most likely legal scansion of a line. The model achieves a weighted average F-score of 0.925 on internal cross-validation and 0.909 on held-out testing data. We determine that trochaic alternation with a one syllable anacrusis and words carrying clear stress assignment are the easiest for the model to scan. Lines with multiple double morae of syllables with few characters are the most difficult. We then rank all the epic poetry in the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) by the difficulty of the meter. Finally, we investigate the double mora, which MHG poets used to draw attention to chosen concepts. We conclude that poets generally chose to use the double mora to emphasize highly sonorant words.

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Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry

Cited by 4 publications

References 18 publications

Data-Driven Syllabification for Middle Dutch

Data-Driven Syllabification for Middle Dutch

Diachronic Topics in New High German Poetry

A Metrical Analysis of Medieval German Poetry Using Supervised Learning

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