@inproceedings{ciletti-2025-prompting,
    title = "Prompting the Muse: Generating Prosodically-Correct {L}atin Speech with Large Language Models",
    author = "Ciletti, Michele",
    editor = "Zhao, Jin  and
      Wang, Mingyang  and
      Liu, Zhu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.48/",
    pages = "740--745",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-254-1",
    abstract = "This paper presents a workflow that compels an audio-enabled large language model to recite Latin poetry with metrically accurate stress. One hundred hexameters from the Aeneid and the opening elegiac epistula of Ovid{'}s Heroides constitute the test bed, drawn from the Pedecerto XML corpus, where ictic syllables are marked. A preprocessing pipeline syllabifies each line, converts alien graphemes into approximate English-Italian counterparts, merges obligatory elisions, adds commas on caesurae, upper-cases every ictic syllable, and places a grave accent on its vowel. Verses are then supplied, one at a time, to an LLM-based Text-to-Speech model under a compact system prompt that instructs slow, articulated delivery. From ten stochastic realisations per verse, a team of Latin experts retained the best; at least one fully correct file was found for 91{\%} of the 216 lines. Upper-casing plus accent marking proved the strongest cue, while hyphenating syllables offered no benefit. Remaining errors cluster around cognates where the model inherits a Romance or English stress template. The corpus of validated audio and all scripts are openly released on Zenodo, opening avenues for pedagogy, accessibility, and prosodic research."
}