A corpus of Persian literary text

Abstract

Persian poetry has profoundly affected all periods of Persian literature and the literature of other countries as well. It is a fundamental vehicle for expressing Persian culture and political opinion. This paper presents a corpus of Persian literary text mainly focusing on poetry, covering the ninth to twenty-first century annotated for century and style, with additional partial annotation of rhetorical figures. Our resource is the largest and the most diverse corpus available in Persian literary text, with a particularly broad temporal scope. This allows us to conduct several computational experiments to analyze poetic styles, authors and time periods, as well as context shifts over time, for which we rely both on supervised models and on Persian poetry-specific heuristics. The corpus, the tools, and experiments described in this paper can be used not only for digital humanities studies of Persian literature but also for processing Persian texts in general, as well as in other broader cross-linguistic applications.