# (Not) Understanding Latin Poetic Style with Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06150/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Metre as a stylometric feature in Latin hexameter poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12478/) (2019)
- [Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07148/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article summarizes some mostly unsuccessful attempts to understand authorial style by examining the attention of various neural networks (LSTMs and CNNs) trained on a corpus of classical Latin verse that has been encoded to include sonic and metrical features. Carefully configured neural networks are shown to be extremely strong authorship classifiers, so it is hoped that they might therefore teach `traditional' readers something about how the authors differ in style. Sadly their reasoning is, so far, inscrutable. While the overall goal has not yet been reached, this work reports some useful findings in terms of effective ways to encode and embed verse, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the neural network families, and useful (and not so useful) techniques for designing and inspecting NN models in this domain. This article suggests that, for poetry, CNNs are better choices than LSTMs -- they train more quickly, have equivalent accuracy, and (potentially) offer better interpretability. Based on a great deal of experimentation, it also suggests that simple, trainable embeddings are more effective than domain-specific schemes, and stresses the importance of techniques to reduce overfitting, like dropout and batch normalization.