Calculating syllable count automatically from fixed-meter poetry in English and Welsh*

In this article I develop a set of simple algorithms for deriving syllable count information for words from fixed-meter poetry. The focus is on the determination of what features of language or meter might be most useful. I therefore first review what factors might be useful for this, selecting those that require as little information as possible about the language in question and making as few computational demands as possible. We end up with algorithms based on: (i) the number of syllables in each line, (ii) the number of words in each line, (iii) the number of letters in those words, and...

In this article I develop a set of simple algorithms for deriving syllable count information for words from fixed-meter poetry. The focus is on the determination of what features of language or meter might be most useful. I therefore first review what factors might be useful for this, selecting those that require as little information as possible about the language in question and making as few computational demands as possible. We end up with algorithms based on: (i) the number of syllables in each line, (ii) the number of words in each line, (iii) the number of letters in those words, and (iv) the frequency of those words.

I test these algorithms on corpora from English and Welsh, getting parallel results in both cases. The results establish that the variables I identify do have significant success in deriving syllable count, but that work remains to be done.