LibEscansión

A metrical scansion library for Spanish

libEscansión

A Python library for for metrical scansion of mixed Spanish verses

libEscansión is a state-of-the-art Python library for analysing Spanish mixed verses. It parses the verse to find syllabic nuclei, rhythmic pattern, assonance, and consonance, as well as to provide a phonological transcription of the syllables. It scores 98.64% accuracy against the manually annotated corpus [ADSO 100] with the option adso=True, which forces considering interjections as non-stressed to meet ADSO's annotation criteria. This tops the until-now state-of-the-art. Nevertheless, vanilla scansion – i.e., stressing interjections – still outperforms the state-of-the art, achieving 97.01% accuracy. Furthermore, after evaluating the corpus' manual scansion and spelling, we found that the disagreement was in most cases due to an improper spelling or even to non-standard human analysis (unstressed interjections, adverbd in -mente lacking secondary stress, etc.). With a corrected corpus, the agreement reaches 99.13 %, being the resting 0.87% non-erroneus disagreements.

This library is part of the research project Sound and Meaning in Spanish Golden Age Literature. It was created as a means to generate a corpus of parsed metres, which is publicicily accessible here

Installation

pip install libEscansion

Requeriments

Following libraries are required:

• stanza >= 1.7 with Spanish language models
• fonemas >= 2.0.18
• silabeador >= 1.1.11.post6

Usage example

The library provides the class VerseMetre. It accepts an obligatory string for the verse and an optional list of integers with possibles syllable-counts. If a second argment is not provided, it performs a regular scansion, i.e., with all natural dialoephas.

>>> import libEscansion
>>> verse = verse = libscansion.VerseMetre('Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera ', [11,8,7])
>>> verse.count 
11
>>> verse.syllables
['θe', 'rAɾ', 'po', 'dɾA', 'mis', 'O', 'xos', 'la', 'pos', 'tɾE', 'ɾa']
>>> verse.nuclei  
'eAoAiOoaoEa'
>>> verse.rhyme
'eɾa'
>>> verse.asson
'ea'
>>> verse.rhythm  
'-+-+-+---+-'

The directory 'utils' contains a file that can be used to test the library against ADSO 100 (or any other corpus of sonnets whasoever as long as they are encoded as XML-TEI with their metres are annotated). In the same directory containing the XML files, type:

./adso100test.py *xml

Release History

1.1.0 (02/09/2024)

• Optimisation and documentation with AI

1.0.0 (24/07/2023)

• First public version

1.0.0pre5 (5/07/2023)

• Solved bug with fewer syllables than expected

1.0.0pre4 (20/06/2023)

• Rules diphthong vs perception for triphthong

1.0.0pre2 (17/04/2023)

• Solved diaereses identification issue

1.0.0pre1

• Initial arrangement of the directory tree, metadata, &c. to make the mess more presentable in public

How to cite libEscansión

Authors of scientific papers including results generated using libEscansión are encouraged to cite the following paper.

@article{SanzLazaroF_DHQ2024183, 
    author    = {Sanz-Lázaro, Fernando},
    title     = {libEscansión: A Recursive Precedence Approach to Metrical Scansion},
    volume    = {18},
    number    = {3},
    date  = {2024},
    journal   = {Digital Humanities Quarterly},
    url = {[https://doi.org/10.5944/rhd.vol.8.2023.37830](https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/3/000739/000739.html)}
}

Meta

Copyright 2023 Fernando Sanz-Lázaro – @FerdlSanz – fsanzl@gmail.com

Distributed under the LGPL 2.1 license. See LICENSE for more information.

https://github.com/fsanzl/libEscansion

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/fsanzl/libEscansion/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/fooBar)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some fooBar')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/fooBar)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2023 Fernando Sanz-Lázaro <fsanzl@gmail.com>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

References

ADSO 100: Navarro-Colorado, Borja; Ribes Lafoz, María, and Sánchez, Noelia (2015) "Metrical annotation of a large corpus of Spanish sonnets: representation, scansion and evaluation" 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2016 Portorož, Slovenia. (PDF)