Objective Detection of Plautus' Rules by Computer Support

The metre of the Roman comic poet Plautus
(flourished ca. 200 B.C.) still leaves one
mystified. Although the scientific work of the
19th and early 20th century has established a
number of important rules and licences, the
exact range of these laws and licences remains
a matter of debate. Taking into account these
many open questions it is not surprising that
metrical studies (as well as the important
editions) of Plautus still display a huge amount
of discrepancy in their handling of Plautine
metre. The specific problem consists of the large
number of transmitted verses in the Plautine
corpus and the great complexity and diversity of
competing explanations of remarkable metrical
phenomena.
Therefore, until now the results of scholarship
often fail to convince, since they are based either
on a limited textual basis or deal with a specific
metrical phenomenon from the perspective of a
single law or licence without taking into account
competing explanations.
This paper will cover a wide range of previous
research from both Classics (Lotman 2000)
and literature (Garzonio, 2006) to several
techniques in the field of Computer Science
(Heyer et al., 2008 and Volk, 2007). Metric
analyses can be already be computed on
German poems with only a small set of rules
(Bobenhausen, 2009). Results imply, however,
that foreign words are especially difficult to
handle. In contrast to this, ancient texts pose
a different problem as lots of variations of
an original often exist. For this reason metric
analysis can be divided into three different tasks:
-
Task 1
: Dealing with different
variations
and variations of variations (Andreev, 2009
and Rehbein, 2009). Within this paper, a
primary version of a verse is defined by
researchers from Classics. Differences of
variants in relation to the primary version
are highlighted as described in (Büchler et
al., 2009
1
and Rehbein, 2009). The variance
caused by transmissions of several authors
is also important to consider, however, when
working with fuzziness. Consequently a set
of possible metric analysis annotations are
suggested rather than just one result.
-
Task 2
:
Applying a metric rule-set
to a
text corpus (Bobenhausen, 2009 and Fusi
2008). Within this research - similar to part
of speech tagging (Heyer et al., 2003) – a set
of rules is applied to text. However, only the
most probable metric candidate is selected. In
contrast to that research (Bobenhausen, 2009
and Fusi, 2008), the approach in this paper
scores several possible metric analyses.
-
Task 3
:
Training of a metric ruleset
based on manually annotated data from
researchers. Typically, a fixed set of rules is
taken as presumed, however, new rules need
to be added manually. This paper thus also
focuses on the computation of new rules. The
importance of this step is motivated by the
Theory of Selective Perception. Based on this,
new and uncommon rules are determined
by a computer model that is both objective
and independent rather than selective like a
human being.
In the field of natural language processing
the task of tagging text is quite similar to

2
part of speech tagging (POS). Typically, for
such a tagger a Hidden Markov Model (Heyer
et al., 2008) is trained and is traversed by
dedicated algorithms like the Viterbi algorithm
(Heyer et al., 2008). However, the already
mentioned fuzziness of text variants makes
both the training and traversing steps difficult.
Furthermore, in the training step it is necessary
to observe data on a larger window than the
typical memory of 2 or 3. This would increase
the complexity drastically during the trainings
phase. Within the applying phase the Viterbi
algorithm is typically used (Heyer et al., 2003).
This algorithm reduces all paths locally except
the most probable one. In metric analysis
however this assumption is quite critical since
due to syllable fusion an senarius is not required
to have 12 but can also consist of 17 or 18
syllables.
Motivated by the aforementioned problems of
existing approaches this paper describes a three
step approach. In a first step possible syllables
are computed. This is simply done by using
training data. In contrast to German poems
(Bobenhausen, 2009) the approach is aware
of possible fusions of syllables. In the second
step all possible combinations are computed
instantly removing candidates that do not
fulfil the metric requirements. The training
itself is done by distance-based co-occurrences
(Büchler, 2008) on metric tags. In the last
step metric candidates are scored based on
both the training data as well as the variance
of the alternatively transmitted variances. All
relevant candidates are selected by researchers
of Classics. The remaining metric analysis
is represented in a dedicated visualisation
highlighting the differences of several variants
to the primary version (Büchler, 2009 and
Rehbein, 2009).
As an outcome of this paper several results will
be shown. Besides the difference visualisation
both results and experiences in training and
application of a metric model will be provided.
Both the expected results and the developed
software, which can be easily adapted to other
ancient poets, will give an original input to the
research community and motivate and enable
further investigations in the same spirit.
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