Discovering instances of poetic allusion from anthologies of classical Japanese poems

✍ Scribed by Masayuki Takeda; Tomoko Fukuda; Ichiro Nanri; Mayumi Yamasaki; Koichi Tamari

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 227 KB
• Volume: 292
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0304-3975
• DOI: 10.1016/s0304-3975(02)00184-6

✦ Synopsis

Waka is a form of traditional Japanese poetry with a 1300-year history. In this paper, we attempt to semi-automatically discover instances of poetic allusion, or more generally, to ÿnd similar poems in anthologies of Waka poems. One reasonable approach would be to arrange all possible pairs of poems in two anthologies in decreasing order of similarity values, and to scrutinize high-ranked pairs by human e ort. The means of deÿning similarity between Waka poems plays a key role in this approach. In this paper, we generalize existing (dis)similarity measures into a uniform framework, called string resemblance systems, and using this framework, we develop new similarity measures suitable for ÿnding similar poems. Using the measures, we report successful results in ÿnding instances of poetic allusion between two anthologies Kokin-Shu and Shin-Kokin-Shu. Most interestingly, we have found an instance of poetic allusion that has never before been pointed out in the long history of Waka research.