Rantanplan: Fast and Accurate Syllabification and Scansion of Spanish Poetry

Automated analysis of Spanish poetry corpora lacks the richness of tools available for English. The existing options suffer from a number of issues: are limited to fixed-metre hendecasyllabic verses, are not publicly available, the syllabification procedure underneath is not thoroughly tested, and their speed is questionable. This paper introduces new methods to alleviate these concerns. For syllabification, we contribute with our own method and manually crafted corpus. For scansion, our approach is based on a heuristic for the application of rhetorical figures that alter metrical length. Experimental evaluation shows that both fixed-metre and mixed-metre poetry can be successfully analyzed, producing metrical patterns more accurately (increasing accuracy by 2% and 15%, respectively), and at a fraction of the time other methods need (running at least 100 times faster).