# Learning meters of Arabic and English poems with Recurrent Neural Networks: a step forward for language understanding and synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Various Tokenizers for Arabic Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07540/) (2021)
- [AraPoemBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Arabic Poetry Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12392/) (2024)
- [Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05760/) (2024)
- [Arabic Text Diacritization In The Age Of Transfer Learning: Token Classification Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04848/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End OCR Framework for Robust Arabic-Handwriting Recognition using a Novel Transformers-based Model and an Innovative 270 Million-Words Multi-Font Corpus of Classical Arabic with Diacritics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11484/) (2022)
- [A Rhythm-Aware Phrase Insertion for Classical Arabic Poetry Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18514/) (2025)
- [Ashaar: Automatic Analysis and Generation of Arabic Poetry Using Deep Learning Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06218/) (2023)
- [ATHAR: A High-Quality and Diverse Dataset for Classical Arabic to English Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19835/) (2024)
- [Automatic Meter Classification of Kurdish Poems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12109/) (2021)
- [RabindraNet, Creating Literary Works in the Style of Rabindranath Tagore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00481/) (2022)
- [Poem Meter Classification of Recited Arabic Poetry: Integrating High-Resource Systems for a Low-Resource Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12172/) (2025)
- [PARSI: Persian Authorship Recognition via Stylometric Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21840/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recognizing a piece of writing as a poem or prose is usually easy for the majority of people; however, only specialists can determine which meter a poem belongs to. In this paper, we build Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models that can classify poems according to their meters from plain text. The input text is encoded at the character level and directly fed to the models without feature handcrafting. This is a step forward for machine understanding and synthesis of languages in general, and Arabic language in particular. Among the 16 poem meters of Arabic and the 4 meters of English the networks were able to correctly classify poem with an overall accuracy of 96.38% and 82.31% respectively. The poem datasets used to conduct this research were massive, over 1.5 million of verses, and were crawled from different nontechnical sources, almost Arabic and English literature sites, and in different heterogeneous and unstructured formats. These datasets are now made publicly available in clean, structured, and documented format for other future research. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this research is the first to address classifying poem meters in a machine learning approach, in general, and in RNN featureless based approach, in particular. In addition, the dataset is the first publicly available dataset ready for the purpose of future computational research.