The rhetorical nature of rhythm
Mihaela Balint, Mihai Dascălu, Ștefan Trăușan-Matu · 2016
Up to date, linguistic rhythm has been studied for speech, but the rhythm of written texts has been merely recognized, and not analyzed or interpreted in connection to natural language tasks. We provide an extension of the textual rhythmic features we proposed in previous work, and demonstrate its benefits for the task of text categorization. Rhythmic features require that the text be segmented in rhythmic units, the sentence being the default unit. We compute our features using three kinds of rhythmic units, provide a comparison between their relevance, and use the results to outline the rhetorical nature of rhythm.