Towards Rhythmicity Analysis of Text using Empirical Mode Decomposition
Robertas Damaševičius, Jurgita Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė, Marcin Woźniak · 2017
The rhythmicity characteristics of the written text is still an under-researched topic as opposed to the similar research in the speech analysis domain. The paper presents a method for text deconstruction into text modes using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). First, the text is encoded into a numerical sequence using a mapping table. Next, the resulting numerical sequence is decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using EMD. The resulting text modes provide a basis for further analysis of a text as well as specific characteristics of the language of the text itself. The text modes are used further to derive the measures of text complexity (cardinality) and rhythmicity (frequency) as well as the visual representations (scalograms, convograms), which can provide important insights into the structure of the text itself. The application of EMD to text analysis allows to decompose text into basic harmonics, which can be attributed to the structural units of the text such as syllables, words, verses and stanzas. Higher order harmonics however can be observed only in the rhymed types of the text such as poetry.