TY - CONF
T1 - Confirming the themes and interpretive unity of Ghazal poetry using topic models
AU - Asgari, Ehsaneddin
AU - Ghassemi, Marzyeh
AU - Finlayson, Mark Alan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - We apply topic modeling to classifying the genre of Ghazal, a form common in Persian poetry. We show that a classifier based on automatically-generated topics exposes important information with only a small performance penalty: the top discriminative topics can be manually aligned with themes prevalent in the associated genres, as identified by scholars of literature. We also weigh in on a long-standing debate about the interpretive unity of Ghazal. In particular, we show evidence that, on the average, Ghazals seem to have interpretive unity at the level of the full poem, as opposed to just at the level of the couplet. Our dataset is a collection of almost 18,000 Ghazal, comprising over 3 million words. The collection contains poems from 30 different poets, and spans nearly 900 years (1080 A.D.–1968).
AB - We apply topic modeling to classifying the genre of Ghazal, a form common in Persian poetry. We show that a classifier based on automatically-generated topics exposes important information with only a small performance penalty: the top discriminative topics can be manually aligned with themes prevalent in the associated genres, as identified by scholars of literature. We also weigh in on a long-standing debate about the interpretive unity of Ghazal. In particular, we show evidence that, on the average, Ghazals seem to have interpretive unity at the level of the full poem, as opposed to just at the level of the couplet. Our dataset is a collection of almost 18,000 Ghazal, comprising over 3 million words. The collection contains poems from 30 different poets, and spans nearly 900 years (1080 A.D.–1968).
M3 - Paper
ER -