Computational Analysis of the Historical Changes in Poetry and Prose

Amitha Gopidi, Aniket Alam


Abstract
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. Novel features in 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 in 1970-2019.
Anthology ID:
W19-4702
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4702
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4702
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amitha Gopidi and Aniket Alam. 2019. Computational Analysis of the Historical Changes in Poetry and Prose. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 14–22, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Computational Analysis of the Historical Changes in Poetry and Prose (Gopidi & Alam, LChange 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W19-4702.pdf