A bridge too far for artificial intelligence?: Automatic classification of stanzas in Spanish poetry

The rise in artificial intelligence and natural language processing techniques has increased considerably in the last few decades. Historically, the focus has been primarily on texts expressed in prose form, leaving mostly aside figurative or poetic expressions of language due to their rich semantics and syntactic complexity. The creation and analysis of poetry have been commonly carried out by hand, with a few computer-assisted approaches. In the Spanish context, the promise of machine learning is starting to pan out in specific tasks such as metrical annotation and syllabification. However, there is a task that remains unexplored and underdeveloped: stanza classification. This classification of the inner structures of verses in which a poem is built upon is an especially relevant task for poetry studies since it complements the structural information of a poem. In this work, we analyzed different computational approaches to stanza classification in the Spanish poetic tradition. These approaches show that this task continues to be hard for computers systems, both based on classical machine learning approaches as well as statistical language models and cannot compete with traditional computational paradigms based on the knowledge of experts.