BINARY ENCODING OF THE RHYTHM AND METER OF VERSE: POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS AND PROBLEMS

The paper introduces a series of concepts that can be interpreted as elements of a mathematical model of verse rhythm. We try to give rigorous definitions and formulate statements that can be proven mathematically whenever it is possible. The paper uses the common mathematical notation, mathematical, linguistical, and poetical terms without any explication. These terms and notation are listed in the first section of the paper. The paper also introduces a set of new terms and new notation. For these terms and notation, we always define terms and explain notation. The paper discuss: numeric characteristics of meter and rhythm (the quantity of syllables in a foot, the quantity of syllables in an anacrusis, the quantity of syllables and feet in a verse line), a set-theoretic model of rhythm (the set of serial numbers of accented syllables), a bit model of rhythm (the string of bits where 0 corresponds to an unaccented syllable and 1 corresponds to an accented syllable). The paper considers the relation between the numeric characteristics, set-theo- retic and bit models. We use the mathematical technique from the paper to describe algorithms for recognizing verse meter (two versions of the algorithm), rhythmic form of iambic tetrameter, caesura position, logaed. The paper considers examples of short verse texts with tables and diagrams. Despite advanced mathematical technique and various examples, we can consider decisions from the paper only as hypotheses. To confirm these hypotheses, we must perform an investigation of a rather large corpus of verse texts and count recognition quality metrics for the above algorithms.