Break it Down for Me: A Study in Automated Lyric Annotation

Comprehending lyrics, as found in songs and poems, can pose a challenge to human and machine readers alike. This motivates the need for systems that can understand the ambiguity and jargon found in such creative texts, and provide commentary to aid readers in reaching the correct interpretation. We introduce the task of automated lyric annotation (ALA). Like text simplification, a goal of ALA is to rephrase the original text in a more easily understandable manner. However, in ALA the system must often include additional information to clarify niche terminology and abstract concepts. To stimulate research on this task, we release a large collection of crowdsourced annotations for song lyrics. We analyze the performance of translation and retrieval models on this task, measuring performance with both automated and human evaluation. We find that each model captures a unique type of information important to the task.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of EMNLP 201

THE WEALTH CONCEPT OF JAVANESE SOCIETY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS APPROACH IN CUBLAK-CUBLAK SUWENG FOLKSONG THE WEALTH CONCEPT OF JAVANESE SOCIETY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS APPROACH IN CUBLAK-CUBLAK SUWENG FOLKSONG

This study discusses a children's folksong which is usually sung in a children game. The folksong, then, is analyzed using an anthropological linguistics approach. Anthropological linguistics emphasizes on language as a major source as expressing mindset of society. Cublak-CublakSuweng is a games song that comes from Central Java. Song -which is part of the culture of grown society- in essence, teaches children about life precepts. This study uses a structural approach which analyzes the use of language in the cultural dimensions include: form, meaning, and value. Having studied the song, it turns out that Cublak-CublakSuweng has great philosophy that reflects the Javanese society

Kognitywna rama epicka w psalmach : studium przypadku polskich przekładów psalmu 137

The main aim of this article is an attempt to rede ne the genre of Psalm 137 with the notion of the epic cognitive framework of the Psalms. Analysis of the prevailing aesthetic value (PAV) and co- gnitive frameworks in Compositional Slots Analysis (CSA) identi es two basic types: a lament and a great story of liberation, which was also a component of revenge. To de ne the aesthetic value and the cognitive framework author analyzed the composition of Psalm 137 and examined 14 examples and compared them with 15 English, 2 Swedish, and 1 Czech. In total, 32 texts were compared with the classic texts of the Psalms in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. During the analysis, a parameter of cultural archaism is used (PCA).Głównym celem artykułu jest próba ponownego zdefiniowania przynależności gatunkowej psalmu 137 przy użyciu pojęcia kognitywnej ramy epickiej psalmów. Analiza dominującej wartości estetycznej oraz ram kognitywnych pozwala zidentyfikować dwa podstawowe gatunki: lament oraz wielką opowieść o wyzwoleniu, której składnikiem jest także zemsta. Aby zdefiniować wartość estetyczną (PAV) oraz ramy kognitywne (CSA) autor analizuje kompozycyjne sloty psalmu 137. Przebadano 14 polskich przykładów i porównano je z 15 angielskimi, 2 szwedzkimi, 1 czeskim. W sumie porównano 32 teksty i odniesiono je do klasycznych tekstów psalmów po hebrajsku, grecku i łacinie. Podczas analizy użyto także pojęcia parametru archaiczności kulturowej

The Song from the Singer: Personification, Embodiment, and Anthropomorphization in Troubadour Lyric

This dissertation explores the relationship of the act of singing to being a human in the lyric poetry of the troubadours, traveling poet-musicians who frequented the courts of contemporary southern France in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that the troubadours surpass traditionally-held perceptions of their corpus as one entirely engaged with themes of courtly romance and society, and argue that their lyric poetry instead both displays the influence of philosophical conceptions of sound, and critiques notions of personhood and sexuality privileged by grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. I examine a poetic device within troubadour songs that I term ‘personified song’—an occurrence in the lyric tradition where a performer turns toward the song he/she is about to finish singing and directly addresses it. This act lends the song the human capabilities of speech, motion, and agency. It is through the lens of the ‘personified song’ that I analyze this understudied facet of troubadour song. Chapter One argues that the location of personification in the poetic text interacts with the song’s melodic structure to affect the type of personification the song undergoes, while exploring the ways in which singing facilitates the creation of a body for the song. Chapters Two and Three examine specific types of body formation located in the tornadas of the personified songs. In Chapter Two, I argue that the troubadours exploit pedagogies of singing and philosophical conceptions of sound to undercut the privileging of heterosexual relationships as the only, “natural” form of sexual relationship. In Chapter Three, I argue that troubadour lyric poetry engages with Latin grammatical treatises to undermine the primacy of a binary gender system, and open up space within the lyric for a third gender. I examine songs whose tornadas include both of the differently gendered (masculine and feminine) versions of the Old Occitan noun for “song,” exploring the complicated (and often contradictory) way in which multiple subject positions were expected to inhabit a single person, and suggesting a fluidity of gendered constructs that permeates the lyric corpus as a whole. In my final chapter, I argue that the troubadours continue to act as social critics even after their poetic tradition comes to an end, as the songs form different types of bodies through their contact with the parchment page of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. I analyze the songs’s lives as objects of literary transmission, exploring how the concept of the personified song changes when its audience no longer encounters it in performance. I argue that, although the personified songs do not make explicit reference to the parchment on which they come to be written, they are similarly embodied with parchment-skins that simultaneously serve as body and body-covering

The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge and Reward in the Middle English Lyric

“The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge and Reward in the Middle English Lyric” explores the genre’s history and literary merits while addressing the question of why this valuable and extensive body of literature has largely gone untapped by scholars. The introductory sections detail the historical and modern contexts of the lyric, including the state of scholarship, manuscripts, editions, dating issues, purpose, audience, types of lyrics, and themes. This background informs a discussion of the genre’s difficulties and offers solutions with which to counter them. Close readings of eight poems are included to exemplify the lyric’s thematic range, stylistic diversity, and literary worth. The goal of this study is to demonstrate that, despite its inherent challenges, the lyric is an important part of the Middle English corpus. While Chaucer continues to enjoy a plethora of scholarly attention, the lyric offers tremendous complexity and depth that is no less valuable and should not be ignored

The low hum in syllables and meters : Blues poetics in bob Dylan's verbal art

AbstractQuotation marks removed from title to ensure sorting in alphabetical order// Note: The Peformance Artistry of Bob Dylan: Conference Proceedings of the Caen Colloquiu