Automatic Syllabification of Dante's "Divine Comedy"

What is it about?

The hendecasyllable is the most important metric of the Italian poetic tradition; its articulation foresees a fixed accent on the tenth syllable and, in the prevailing (canonical) type, at least one main accent of the fourth or sixth syllable. However, due to the continuous phono-syntactic chain of natural languages, the divison in syllables is far from trivial. In this work we succesfully address the problem by means of probabilistic and constraint programming techniques.

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Photo by Tbel Abuseridze on Unsplash

Photo by Tbel Abuseridze on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The work opens a number of exciting perspectives on automatic processing or computer assisted analysis of digital sources, comprising e.g. automated detection of anomalous and problematic cases, metric clustering of verses and their categorization, investigations on the phonetic roles of consonants and vowels, or improved generative techniques, aware of metric issues, and more respectful of the expected musicality.

Perspectives