Having discussed some general aspects of rhyming in a couple of different
languages, in last month's blog post, the third post in this series is devoted to
the question of how rhyme can be
annotated.
Annotation plays a crucial role in almost all fields of linguistics. The main
idea is to add value to a given resource (
Milà-Garcia
2018). What value we add to resources can differ widely,
but as far as textual resources are concerned, we can say that the information
that we add can usually not be extracted automatically from the resource.
In our case, the information we want to explicitly add to rhyme texts or
rhyme corpora is the rhyme relations between words. Retrieving this information
may be trivial, as in the case of
Shakespeare's Sonnets, where we know the
rhyme schema in advance, but it is considerably complicated when working with
other, less strict types of rhyming.
One usually distinguishes two basic types of annotation:
inline and
stand-off (
Eckart 2012). For inline annotation, we add our
information directly into our textual resource, while stand-off annotation
creates an index over the resource, and then adds the information in a separate resource that refers to the index of the original text.
Both methods have their pros and cons. Stand-off annotation often seems
to provide a cleaner solution (as one never knows how much a manual annotation added into a text might modify the text involuntarily). However, inline annotation has,
in my experience, the advantage of allowing for a much faster annotation
process, at least as long as the annotation has to be done in text files
directly, without interfaces that could help to assist in the annotation
process.
Overview of existing annotation practice
If we look at different practices that have been used to annotate rhymes in
collections of poetry, we will find quite a variety of techniques that have been
used so far.
Wáng (1980), for example, uses an inline annotation style in
his corpus of the rhymes in the
Book of Odes, as illustrated in the
following example taken from
List et al. (2019). In this
annotation, rhyme words are indirectly annotated by providing reconstructed
readings for the Chinese characters which are supposed to narrow the original
pronunciation. Whenever two rhyme words share the same main vowel, the author
would have judged them to have rhymed in the original text.
 |
| Annotation in Wáng (1980) |
Baxter (1992) uses a stand-off annotation, which is shown
(again taken from List et al. 2019) in the following table. An advantage of
Baxter's annotation is that it allows him to provide multiple layers of
information for each rhyme word. A disadvantage is that a clear index to the
words in the poem is lacking. While this is not entirely problematic, since it
is usually easy to identify which words are in rhyme position, it is not
entirely "safe", from an annotation point-of-view, as it may still create
ambiguities.
 |
| Annotation in Baxter (1992) |
In a study of automated rhyme word detection,
Haider and Kuhn
(2018) use annotated rhyme datasets from a variety of German
styles (Hip Hop, contemporary lyrics, and more ancient lyrics). To annotate the
data, they use the standard format of the
Text Encoding
Initiative, which is
based essentially on XML. Unfortunately, however, they do not provide tags for
each word that rhymes, but instead only add an attribute to each stanza,
indicating the rhyme schema, as can be seen in the example below:
<lg rhyme="aabccb" type="stanza">
<l>Vor seinem Löwengarten,</l>
<l>Das Kampfspiel zu erwarten,</l>
<l>Saß König Franz,</l>
<l>Und um ihn die Großen der Krone,</l>
<l>Und rings auf hohem Balkone</l>
<l>Die Damen in schönem Kranz.</l>
</lg>
The drawback of this annotation style is that it places the annotation where it
does not belong, assuming that a poem only rhymes the words that appear in the
end of a line, and that there are no exceptions.
For French, I found an interesting website called
métrique en
ligne, offering a large number
of phonetically analyzed texts in French. They offer a rhyme analysis in an
interactive fashion: one can have a look at a poem in raw form and then see
which parts of the words appear in rhyme relation. A screenshot of the website
(with the poem "Les Phares" from Charles Baudelaire) illustrates this
annotation:
It is very nice that the project offers the rhyme annotation in such a
clear form, annotating explicitly those parts of the words (albeit in
orthography) that are supposed to be responsible for the rhyming. However, the annotation
has a clear drawback, in that it provides rhyme annotation only on the level of
the stanza, although we know well that quite a few poems have recurring rhymes
that are reused across many stanzas, and we would like to acknowledge that in
our annotation.
The most complete annotation of poetry I have found so far is ``MCFlow: A
Digital Corpus of Rap Transcriptions'' (
Condit-Schultz
2017). The goal of the annotation was not to annotate
rhyme in the primary instance, but to provide a corpus that also takes the musical
and rhythmic aspects of rap into account. As a result it offers annotations
along seven major aspects: rhythm, stress, tone, break, rhyme, pronunciation,
and the lyrics themselves. The rhyme annotation itself is provided for each
syllable (the texts themselves are all syllabified), with capital letters
indicating stressed, and lower case letters indicating unstressed syllables.
Rhyme units (usually, but not necessarily words) are marked by brackets.
The
following figure from Condit-Schultz (2017) illustrates this schema.
 |
| Annotation of rhymes by Condit-Schultz (2017) |
What I do not entirely understand is the
motivation of using the same lowercase letters for unstressed syllables as for
the stressed ones in a rhyme sequence. Given that the information about stress is
generally available from the annotation, it seems redundant to add it; and it is
not clear to me for what it serves, specifically also because unstressed
syllables do not necessarily rhyme in rhyme sequences. But apart from this, I
find the information that this annotation schema provides quite convincing,
although I find the format difficult to parse computationally; and I also imagine
that it is quite difficult to annotate it manually.
Initial reflections on rhyme annotation
When dealing with annotation schemas and trying to develop a framework for
annotation, it is always useful to recall the
Zen of
Python, especially the first seven
lines:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
What I think we can extract from these seven lines are the following
basic rules
for an initial annotation schema for rhyme data.
- First, ideally, we want
an annotation schema that gives us the same look and feel
that we know when reading a poem. This does not mean we need to store
the full
annotation in this schema, but for a quick editing of rhyme relations,
such an
annotation schema has many advantages.
- Second,
in order to maintain explicitness, all rhymes should be treated as
rhyming
globally inside a poem — we should never restrict annotation of rhymes to a
single stanza, and we should also avoid brackets to
mark rhyming sequences, as there are other ways to
assign words to units.
- Third,
we should be explicit enough to show which parts of a word rhyme but,
for now, I think it is not necessary to annotate all syllables at the same time.
Since this would cost a lot of time, and specifically since syllabification
differs from language to language, it seems better to add this information later
on a language-specific basis, semi-automatically. Since many words repeat across
poems, one can design a lookup-table to syllabify a word much more easily from a
corpus that has been assembled, than adding the information when preparing each
poem.
Towards a: Standardized Annotation of Rhyme Data
Last year, we proposed an annotation schema for rhyme annotation (
List et
al. 2019). Our basic idea was inspired by tabular formats. These are used in linguistic software packages dealing with problems in
computational historical linguistics, such as
LingPy. They are also used as
the backbone of the
Cross-Linguistic Data Formats
Initiative (
Forkel et al. 2018),
which uses tabular formats in combination with metadata in order to render
linguistic datasets (wordlists, information on structural features)
cross-linguistically comparable. Essentially, the format can be seen as a
stand-off annotation, where the original data are not modified directly.
While our basic format was rather powerful with
respect to what can be annotated, it is also very difficult to code data in this
format, at least in the absence of a proper annotation tool.
At the same time, to ease the initial preparation of annotated rhyme data
conforming to these standards, we proposed an intermediate format, in which a
poem was provided just in text form, with minimal markup for metadata, and in
which rhymes could be annotated inline. As an example, consider the first two
stanzas of the poem "Morning has broken" by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965):
@ANNOTATOR: Mattis
@CREATED: 2020-06-26 06:09:04
@TITLE: Morning has broken
@AUTHOR: Eleanor Farjeon
@BIODATE: 1881-1965
@YEAR: before 1965
@MODIFIED: 2020-06-26 06:09:46
@LANGUAGE: English
Morning has [a]broken like the first morning
Blackbird has [a]spoken like the first [b]bird
Praise for the [c]singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them [c]springing fresh from the [b]Word
Sweet the rain's [e]new_[f]fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first [e]dew_[f]fall on the first [g]grass
Praise for the [d]sweet[h]ness of the wet garden
Sprung in com[d]plete[h]ness where His feet [g]pass
As you can see from this example, we start with some metadata (which is more or
less a free form, consisting of the formula
@key: value, and then render the
stanzas, line by line, separating stanzas by one blank line. Rhymes are
annotated by enclosing rhyme labels in angular brackets
before the part of the
word responsible for the rhyme. If wanted, one can annotate rhymes for each
syllable, as done in the rhyme words
[d]sweet[h]ness and
com[d]plete[h]ness,
but one can also only annotate the rhyme as a whole, as done in the rhyme words
[a]broken and
[a]spoken.
In order to assign words to rhyme units, an understroke can be used that
indicates that two orthographic words are perceived as one unit in the rhyme,
which is the case for
[e]new_[f]fall rhyming with
[e]dew_fall.
Furthermore, if a stanza reappears throughout a poem or song in the form of a
refrain, this can be indicated by adding two spaces before all lines of the
stanza.
Comments can be added by beginning a line with the hash symbol
#, as shown in this small excerpt of Bob Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady of the
Lowlands".
# [Verse 1]
With your mercury mouth in the missionary [c]times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like [c]rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like [c]chimes
Oh, who do they think could [i]bury_[j]you?
With your pockets well protected at [e]last
And your streetcar visions which ya' place on the [e]grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like [e]glass
Who could they get to [i]carry_[j]you?
# [Chorus]
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet say that no man [a]comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian [a]drums
Should I put them by your [b]gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I [b]wait?
When testing this framework on many different kinds of poems from different
languages and styles, I realized that the greedy rhyme annotation that I used
(you place the rhyme tag
before a word, and all letters that follow will be
considered to belong to that very rhyme tag) has a disadvantage in those
situations where syllables in multi-syllabic rhyme units essentially do
not
rhyme. As an example consider the following lines from Eminem's "
Not
Afraid":
I'ma be what I set out to be,
without a doubt, undoubtedly
And all those who look down on me,
I'm tearin' down your balcony
Here, the author plays with rhymes centering around the words
out to be,
undoubtedly,
down on me, and
balcony. Condit-Schultz has annotated the
rhymes as follows (I use the rhyme schema inline for simplicity):
I'ma D|be what I set (C|out c|to D|be),
wi(C|thout c|a) (C|doubt, c|un)(C|doub.c|ted.D|ly)
And all those who look (C|down c|on D|me),
I'm tearin' C|down your (C|bal.c|co.D|ny)
In my opinion, however, the parts annotated with
c by Condit-Schultz do not
really rhyme in these lines, they are mere fillers for the rhythm, while the
most important rhyme parts, which are also perceived as such, are the stressed
syllables with the main vowel
ou. To mark that a syllable is not really
rhyming, but also in order to mark the border of a rhyme (and thus allow indication that only the first syllable of a word rhymes with another word), I
therefore decided to introduce a specific "empty" rhyme symbol, which is now
represented by a plus. My annotation of the lines thus looks as follows:
I'ma be what I set [h]out_[+]to_[e]be,
wi[h]thout a [h]doubt, un[h]doub[+]tab[e]ly
And all those who look [h]down_[d]on_[e]me
I'm tearin' down your bal[d]co[e]ny
An Interactive Tool for Rhyme Annotation
While I consider the inline-annotation format as now rather complete (with
all limitations resulting from inline-annotation), I realized, when trying to
annotate poems by using the format, that it is not fun to edit text files in this
way. I am not talking about small edits, like one stanza, or typing in some
metadata — annotating a whole rap song can become very tedious and even
problematic, as one may easily forget which rhyme tags one has already used, or
oversee which words have been annotated as rhyming, or forget brackets and the
like.
As a result, I decided to write an interactive rhyme annotation tool that
supports the inline-annotation format and can be edited both in the text and
interactively at the same time. This is a bit similar to the text processing programs in
blogging software, which allow writing both in the HTML source and in a more
convenient version that shows you what you will get.
The following screenshot in the database, for example, shows how the rhymes in
Shakespeare's
Sonnet Number 98 are
visually rendered.
 |
| Visual display of Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 |
This tool is now already available online. I call it
RhyAnT, which is short for Rhyme Annotation
Tool. I have been using it in combination with a small server, to
populate a first database with rhymes in different languages, which already contains more than 350 annotated poems. This database can be accessed and
inspected by everybody interested, at
AntRhyme;
but copyrighted texts from modern songs can — unfortunately — not be rendered yet (as I am not sure how many I would be allowed to share).
I do not want to claim that I am gifted as a designer (I am surely not), and it is possible that
there are better ways to implement the whole interface. However, I find it important
to note that the format itself, with the coloring of rhyme words, has
dramatically increased my efficiency at annotating rhyme data, and also my
accuracy in spotting similarities.
 |
| Annotating the same poem with RhyAnT, the interactive rhyme annotator |
The above screenshot shows how I can
edit the poem from my edit access to the database. Alternatively, one can just
paste in the text and edit it on the publicly accessible interface of the RhyAnT
tool, edit the data, and then copy-paste it to store it. In this form, the
interface can already be used by anybody who wants to annotate rhymes in their
work.
Outlook
The current annotation framework that I have illustrated here is not almighty,
specifically because it does not allow for multi-layered annotation
(
Banski 2019: 230f), which would allow us to add
pronunciation, rhythm, and many other aspects than rhyming alone. However, I
hope that many of these aspects can be later added quickly, by creating lookup
tables and processing the annotated corpus automatically. Following the
Zen of
Python, this seems to be much simpler than investing a lot of time in the
creation of a highly annotated dataset that would discourage working with the
data from the beginning.
References
Bański, Piotr and Witt, Andreas (2019) Modeling and annotating
complex data structures. In: Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis (eds)
The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources. Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 217-235.
Baxter, William H. (1992)
A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Nathaniel Condit-Schultz (2017) MCFlow: A Digital Corpus of Rap Transcriptions.
Empirical Musicology Review 11.2: 124-147.
Eckart, Kerstin (2012):Resource annotations. In: Clarin-D, AP 5 (ed.) Berlin: DWDS, pp. 30-42.
Forkel, Robert and List, Johann-Mattis and Greenhill, Simon J. and
Rzymski, Christoph and Bank, Sebastian and Cysouw, Michael and
Hammarström, Harald and Haspelmath, Martin and Kaiping, Gereon A. and
Gray, Russell D. (2018) Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data
sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics.
Scientific Data 5.180205: 1-10.
Haider, Thomas and Kuhn, Jonas (2018) Supervised rhyme detection
with Siamese recurrent networks. In:
Proceedings of Workshop on
Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences,
Humanities and Literature, pp. 81-86.
List, Johann-Mattis and Nathan W. Hill and Christopher J. Foster
(2019) Towards a standardized annotation of rhyme judgments in Chinese
historical phonology (and beyond).
Journal of Language Relationship 17.1: 26-43.
Milà‐Garcia, Alba (2018) Pragmatic annotation for a multi-layered analysis of speech acts: a methodological proposal.
Corpus Pragmatics 2.1: 265-287.
Wáng, Lì 王力 (2006) Hànyǔ shǐgǎo 漢語史稿 [
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