Aoidos: A system for the automatic scansion of poetry written in Portuguese

Abstract

Scansion is the activity of determining the patterns that give verses their poetic rhythm. In Portuguese, this means discovering the number of syllables that the verses in a poem have and fitting all verses to this measure, while attempting to pronounce syllables so that an adequate stress pattern is produced. This article presents Aoidos, a rule-based system that takes a poem written in the Portuguese language and performs scansion automatically, further providing an analysis of rhymes. The system works by making a phonetic transcription of a poem, determining the number of poetic syllables that the verses in the poem should have, fitting all the verses according to this measure and looking for verses that rhyme. Experiments show that the system attains a high accuracy rate (above 98%).